As Florida prepares for the arrival of Tropical Storm Helene, NASA has announced another delay for the launch of its Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The launch, initially set for Thursday, September 26, has been shifted to 1:17 p.m. ET on Saturday, September 28.
This delay allows NASA teams to complete a crucial rehearsal of launch day activities with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. The spacecraft and rocket, which arrived at Space Launch Complex-40 earlier on Tuesday, will be moved back to the hangar after the rehearsal to avoid potential storm activity.
Tropical Storm Helene, currently moving through the Gulf of Mexico, is expected to impact the Florida panhandle. The storm system is large enough to bring high winds and heavy rain to the Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island regions, where the Kennedy Space Center is located.
This isn’t the first delay for Crew-9, which has faced a series of setbacks. The most recent delay was to allow for more preparation time at Kennedy’s Space Launch Complex 40. While frequently used for launching SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets, this particular complex has never been used for a human spaceflight launch.
Earlier, the launch was postponed for over a month while NASA decided on the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner. Due to ongoing issues with the Starliner’s thrusters, NASA chose to keep the two astronauts from that test flight on the space station and bring them back to Earth with Crew-9. This required a delay until the Starliner left the station and freed up a docking slot.
The two crew members who will embark on the outward leg of Crew-9 are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. They will join former Starliner crew members Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of NASA to form the complete Crew-9. Upon arrival, they will perform a brief handover with the current crew, Crew-8, who are then expected to leave the space station on October 1.
The ISS has been experiencing a flurry of activity recently, with the departure of crew members Tracy C. Dyson of NASA and Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub of Roscosmos earlier this week. They returned to Earth on a Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft and landed safely in a remote region of Kazakhstan on Monday, September 23.
