The SpaceX Polaris Dawn crew splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, in the pre-dawn hours Sunday morning.
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – SpaceX is targeting next week to launch NASA‘s ninth commercial crew spaceflight, and the mission will be unique for two reasons: the launch location and for who is not onboard the Dragon spacecraft.
SpaceX is targeting no earlier than Sept. 26 at 2:05 p.m. ET to launch a Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida with NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague (left) and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are scheduled to launch to the International Space Station as part of NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission no earlier than 2:05 p.m. EDT Thursday, Sept. 26
The first element that sets the Crew-9 launch apart is the location from where SpaceX’s Falcon 9 will launch the spacecraft. All previous human spaceflight launches by SpaceX happened on the NASA Kennedy Space Center side of Florida’s spaceport. Complex 40 is on the military side, managed by the U.S. Space Force.
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SpaceX has been retrofitting the LC-40 to add the crew-access arm and making other changes to add capabilities needed for human spaceflight launches. SpaceX first took over LC-40 in 2008, modifying the launchpad for its Falcon 9 launches.
The second notable difference for Crew-9 is that there will only be two people onboard the Crew Dragon spacecraft.
NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams arrived at the International Space Station on June 6 but NASA considered the risk too great to return the astronauts home on the troubled Boeing Starliner. The crew’s next opportunity to return home will be in February aboard SpaceX capsule.
All other commercial astronaut missions besides SpaceX’s first human spaceflight in 2020 have carried four people to low-Earth orbit. However, Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft encountered a series of problems delivering NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams to the International Space Station in June. After testing on the ground, NASA opted to bring Boeing’s spacecraft back to Earth without the astronauts, leaving two NASA astronauts on the ISS. Starliner landed in New Mexico on Sept. 6.
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The space agency bumped two astronauts from the Crew-9 mission to leave two seats open on Dragon for Williams and Wilmore to return to Earth in February with Hague and Gorbunov.
NASA’s astronauts who launched on Starliner were originally meant to spend about eight days in orbit. When the Dragon splashes down off the coast of Florida in February, Wilmore and Williams will have spent nearly nine months in space.