The pieces are in place for SpaceX’s Crew-9 astronaut mission, which is set to launch this week.
NASA’s Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov arrived at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida on Saturday (Sept. 21). The duo will fly to the International space Station (ISS) aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, which is set to launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket on Thursday (Sept. 26) from Pad 40 at nearby Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
“Hague and Gorbunov will quarantine at the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy,” NASA officials wrote in an update on Saturday. “While there, they’ll conduct a dry dress rehearsal of the mission, sleep shift to align their resting and waking periods with mission requirements, rehearse flight procedures, as well as make calls to family and friends.”
Crew-9’s Dragon, named Freedom, is also on site, SpaceX announced via X on Friday (Sept. 20), in a post that shared two photos of the capsule.
Related: Meet the SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts launching to the International Space Station Sept. 26
As its name suggests, Crew-9 will be the ninth long-duration astronaut mission that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA. These flights usually carry four people; two crewmembers were taken off Crew-9 so Freedom could haul NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams back down to Earth in February at the mission’s end.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the ISS in early June on the first-ever crewed mission of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. They were supposed to come home on Starliner a week or so later, but NASA extended the mission repeatedly to study and troubleshoot thruster issues that the capsule experienced on its way to the orbiting lab.
The agency ultimately decided to bring Starliner back to Earth uncrewed, which happened on Sept. 7, and leave Wilmore and Williams on the ISS until Crew-9 wraps up. As part of that decision, Williams was named commander of the station’s current Expedition 72.
Crew-9 will be the first astronaut mission ever to launch from Pad 40 at Cape Canaveral and just the second crewed effort to fly from the Space Force station overall, after Starliner’s June 5 liftoff. (KSC, which is right next door, has hosted many crewed launches over the decades.)
Hague, Crew-9’s commander, will become the first active U.S. Space Force Guardian to launch to space in the history of the military branch. He lived aboard the ISS from March 2019 to October 2019, but the Space Force wasn’t established until December of that year.
Crew-9 will be the first spaceflight for Gorbunov, a mission specialist who was selected by Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency, in 2018.