Why the SpaceX Crew-9 launch has been delayed again

By Georgina Torbet Published September 19, 2024

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.