SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts, including Boeing Starliner crew, fly Dragon spacecraft to new ISS parking spot (Image Credit: Space.com)
Four astronauts moved their SpaceX Dragon spacecraft to a new space station docking port on Sunday (Nov. 3) to make way for an incoming cargo ship.
The SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts, including two crew members formerly aboard Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, moved their Crew Dragon capsule Freedom to an unused parking spot on top of the International Space Station ahead of the planned Nov. 4 launch of an uncrewed Dragon resupply ship by the company.
SpaceX is scheduled to launch that cargo variant of Dragon from NASA’s Kennedy Space Statin in Florida on Monday at 9:29 p.m. EST (0229 GMT) carrying more than 3 tons of supplies for the ISS crew. It should arrive Tuesday morning (Nov. 5) if all goes well.
During Sunday’s Crew-9 Dragon relocation, the capsule’s four-astronaut crew undocked from the ISS’s Harmony module at 6:35 a.m. EST (1335 GMT) and redocked at 7:25a.m. EST (1425 GMT), moving from the forward-facing port to the space-facing port. At the time of docking, the Dragon capsule and ISS were sailing high above southern Brazil, NASA said.
On board Dragon were NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, both originally assigned to Crew-9, along with former Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of NASA. The astronauts will return to Earth on Dragon Freedom in February 2025.
Related: SpaceX’s Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft arrives at ISS to help bring Starliner astronauts home (video)
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The Starliner duo were reassigned to Crew-9 after NASA determined it was too great of a risk to bring them home safely aboard the Boeing spacecraft to conclude their test ISS mission. Starliner experienced unexpected propulsion issues during docking with the ISS June 6 and the cause and remedy could not be pinned down after nearly two months of troubleshooting.
NASA originally planned to launch two other agency astronauts, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, aboard Crew-9. They were removed from the mission to leave two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to return to Earth with the rest of Crew-9, in February 2025. (Wilson and Cardman remain eligible for future ISS missions.)
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect the successful undocking, relocation and redocking of the Dragon capsule Freedom and its astronaut crew on Nov. 3.