A quick look at which rockets lift off from various Brevard launch sites.
Reduced to a crew of two, NASA's SpaceX Crew-9 will launch Thursday with a pair of designated empty seats aboard their SpaceX Dragon capsule. Why? Those seats will bring Boeing Starliner astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore back to Earth from the International Space Station when the Crew-9 mission wraps up next year.
The Crew-9 duo -- NASA astronaut Nick Hague (commander) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov (mission specialist) -- arrived at NASA's Kennedy Space Center on Saturday afternoon, flying in from Houston aboard a white Gulfstream GV-SP business jet.
Their SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 2:05 p.m. EDT Thursday from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Crew-9 initially had four members, but astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson will stay home to make room so Williams and Wilmore can return home in the Dragon in five months.
"We're going to launch as a two-person crew. And then we're going to land as a four-person crew. And one of the unique challenges of that is, how do we integrate the other two crew members into the Dragon operations when they've had very minimal Dragon training before they launched?" Hague said during a press conference alongside the Gulfstream at KSC's Launch and Landing Facility.
Boeing Starliner: "We wish it would have been the way we had planned it," Starliner returns home without crew
"The teams on the ground have helped not only get us ready, but they've already started helping Butch and Suni train to understand what they're going to need to do inside of the Dragon. But that's going to be top priority when we get there," he said.
On June 5, the Starliner launched to the ISS atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on its historic maiden crewed mission -- which soon went awry as five of the capsule's thrusters shut off en route to the ISS. Williams and Wilmore still remain aboard the orbiting outpost, while Starliner returned for an uncrewed Sept. 7 landing in the New Mexico desert.
Crew-9 will spend about five months on the ISS, with plans to conduct more than 200 science and research demonstrations before returning in February, NASA reported. But on the way up into low-Earth orbit, "essentially we're flying without a pilot," Hague told media Saturday.
Crew-9 will mark the first human spaceflight mission from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The mission is the ninth ISS crew rotation with SpaceX under NASA's Commercial Crew Program.
After addressing media Saturday, Hague and Gorbunov waved to dozens of photographers and boarded a dark blue Chrysler Pacifica with U.S. government license tags to depart the LLF.
"Hague and Gorbunov will quarantine at the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at Kennedy. While there, they'll conduct a dry dress rehearsal of the mission, sleep shift to align their resting and waking periods with mission requirements, rehearse flight procedures, as well as make calls to family and friends," a NASA press release said.
For the latest news from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA's Kennedy Space Center, visit floridatoday.com/space.
Rick Neale is a Space Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact Neale at [email protected]. Twitter/X: @RickNeale1