The company SpaceX will take off on a mission this Saturday with two passengers on board, to the rescue of American astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, trapped for a few months in the International Space Station (ISS).
Who will be on the mission
On board will be the astronaut of the POT Nick Hague and the Russian cosmonaut Alexandre Gorbounov. Their return is scheduled for February and, according to forecasts, they will take the two space veterans with them. Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams.
Both had embarked at the beginning of June aboard a new ship developed by Boeing, Starlinerwithin the framework of the first crewed test flight to the ISS.
What will the rescue be like?
After long weeks of testingthe space agency recovered the empty Boeing capsule and decided to bring back the two castaways with the SpaceX mission, called Crew-9.
“We know that this launch is something uniquewith only two passengers,” he admitted on Friday Jim Freeassociate administrator of NASA, during a press conference in which he thanked SpaceX “for its support and flexibility.”
The billionaire’s company Elon Musk is in charge of this regular ISS crew rotation mission, the duration of which, like the previous ones, must be six months.
However, the takeoff of Crew-9 was delayed from mid-August until the end of September to give NASA teams more time to make a decision regarding the Boeing spacecraft.
The launch had to be postponed again also due to the hurricane Helenewhich struck Florida this week.
The Dragon ship SpaceX is scheduled to dock with the ISS on Sunday around the 21H30 GMT. In total, Nick Hague and Alexandre Gorbounov will pass five months on the ISSwhile Wilmore and Williams about eight. In that period, they will have carried out, according to schedule, about 200 scientific experiments.
How was the accident
The ship should have returned them to Land, eight days after that mission Junebut the failures presented in its propulsion system led NASA to question its reliability.
Source: Ambito
