The SpaceX Crew-9 mission, which will see just two astronauts head to the International Space Station (ISS) with two empty seats on their Crew Dragon spacecraft, has been delayed once again. This time, however, the delay is only one day, with the new launch date set for September 26.
The mission had originally been slated to launch on August 18 with four crew members, but this was pushed back to allow time for the troubled Boeing Starliner capsule to return, uncrewed, from the station. NASA decided that its astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who traveled to the station on the Starliner, would stay on the station and become a part of Crew-9 — so the two empty seats on the Dragon are reserved for them to travel home in in February next year.
The Crew-9 launch was then set for September 25, but the one-day delay is so that teams can “work through prelaunch operations and hardware processing ahead of the first human spaceflight launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while also monitoring weather ahead of liftoff,” NASA officials wrote in a statement.
The new time for the launch is 2:05 p.m. ET (11:05 a.m. PT) on Thursday, September 26. The two crew members traveling on the launch are NASA astronaut Nick Hague, pictured above, and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. They will join Wilmore and Williams, plus three Soyuz crew members, as well as the current Crew-8 members on the station who will be leaving for Earth after a short handover.
This will be Hague’s second mission to the space station, but his third launch into space as he also launched on another mission that was aborted shortly after takeoff. He made it to the station in 2019, when he worked as part of Expeditions 59 and 60. To date, he has spent a total of 203 days in space.
Once they arrive in space, the crew will work on scientific experiments including research into the development of blood cells in space and whether daily vitamin B supplements can help reduced vision problems that happen over long-duration space missions. They will also work on maintenance tasks around the station, such as installing special patches on an X-ray telescope attached to the space station called NICER, which will prevent light leaks and help the telescope take more accurate readings.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.