Following the release of 12 hooks keeping it moored to the zenith port of the International Space Station’s Harmony module, the Dragon Freedom spacecraft drifts away from the ISS to begin its journey back to Earth. Image: NASA via livestream
About an hour after midnight on Tuesday, NASA and SpaceX – the journey home for the four members of the Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. The crew is an unusual blend of two different missions that ultimately coalesced into one.
Dragon Freedom undocked from the space station at 1:05 a.m. EDT (1705 UTC) on Tuesday to begin its roughly 17-hour trip to splash down along Florida’s Gulf Coast. The parachute-supported splash down is anticipated around 5:57 p.m. EDT (2157 UTC).
“On behalf of Crew-9, I’d like to say it was a privilege to call the station home, to live and work and be a part of a mission and a team that spans the globe, working together in cooperation for the benefit of humanity,” said NASA astronaut and Crew-9 commander Nick Hague as he and his crew drifted away from the orbiting outpost.
“To our colleagues and dear friends who remain on the station … we know the station’s in great hands. We’re excited to see what you guys are going to accomplish.”
Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov launched to the ISS onboard the Dragon Freedom spacecraft in September 2024 and will return to Earth after logging 171 total days in space.
Their colleagues, NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, will return to Earth with 286 days in space after originally arriving at the space station onboard the Boeing CST-100 Starliner spacecraft.
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft fires some of its Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters as it backs away from the International Space Station on Sept. 6, 2024. Image: NASA
During the Crew Flight Test mission, which launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on June 5, 2024, NASA leadership made the determination that enough uncertainty existed with the Starliner’s propulsion system that the best course of action would be to return that vehicle to Earth without a crew on board.
Simultaneously, the agency decided that Williams and Wilmore would become full members of Expedition 72 and make a return to Earth as members of Crew-9. When Dragon Freedom launched in September, it did so without two of its original crew members in order to leave seats available to Williams and Wilmore.
Prior to the departure of Starliner, two makeshift seats were created inside Dragon Endeavour (which brought up Crew-8) so that in the case of an emergency, Williams and Wilmore would have a way to return home. While Starliner was docked to the ISS, NASA and Boeing also made the determination that it would be safe to use in an emergency contingency as well.
Crew-9 departed from the ISS following a brief two-day handover between them and Crew-10, who docked with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module on Saturday, March 15. Normally, a handover lasts about five days, but the exchange was abbreviated partly to take advantage of good weather in the Gulf, but also to preserve the amount of consumables onboard the space station.
An issue during transport of Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft delayed its planned launch to the ISS, which caused NASA to do some schedule and manifest shuffling to accommodate the change.
The timing of Crew-10’s launch was also shifted a few times due to the lack of readiness of its original ride, the Crew Dragon spacecraft with the tail number C213.
At one point, that vehicle was slated to fly the Crew-9 mission, but that was changed due to the vehicle not being ready to fly. It was then scheduled for Crew-10, which caused the mission to be delayed from February to March.
With the risk of further delaying the mission because C213 was still not ready to fly, NASA and SpaceX decided to bring up the Dragon Endurance, which was originally positioned to fly the Ax-4 private astronaut mission for Axiom Space.
SpaceX is next expected to fly four commercial astronauts as part of the free-flying polar orbit mission called Fram2. That’s scheduled to launch in late March or early April.
The four commercial astronauts of the Fram2 mission pose inside a Dragon spacecraft training capsule at SpaceX facilities in Hawthorne, California. From left to right: Eric Philips, Rabea Rogge, Jannicke Mikkelsen and Chun Wang. Image: SpaceX
