NASA bumps 2 astronauts from upcoming flight to give Starliner crew a ride home in February
NASA has bumped two female astronauts, including the commander, from the next SpaceX crew rotation flight to the International Space Station, freeing up two seats to give the agency’s Starliner astronauts a ride home next February.
Rookie Crew 9 commander Zena Cardman and veteran Stephanie Wilson will remain behind when the Crew Dragon ferry ship takes off from pad 40 at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Sept. 24 carrying crewmate Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov.
SpaceX
Also on board: clothing, supplies and SpaceX pressure suits for Starliner commander Barry “Butch” Wilmore and co-pilot Sunita Williams, whose originally planned eight-day test flight reached its 86th day on Friday. By the time they land aboard the Crew 9 capsule next February, they will have logged more than 262 days in space.
agency managers decided on Aug. 24 to keep Wilmore and Williams on board the station for an extended stay and to bring the Boeing spacecraft back to Earth by remote control. That left Crew Dragon as the only ship available to take Wilmore and Williams back to Earth.
The Starliner is now expected to undock from the space station on Sept. 6, setting up an uncrewed landing at White Sands, New Mexico, late that night.
The Crew 9 launch is the first step in a complex sequence of flights to replace the station’s seven long-duration crew members with a fresh set of astronauts and cosmonauts.
The Russians plan to launch two cosmonauts, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner, along with NASA astronaut Donald Pettit to the lab complex on Sept. 11. Cosmonauts Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub and NASA’s Tracy Dyson then will return to Earth on Sept. 23, the day before the two-man Crew 9 takes off.
Kononenko and Chub are wrapping up a full year in orbit and will have logged 374 days aloft at touchdown. Kononenko also will set a new record for the most time in space across multiple flights: 1,111 days.
The four Crew 8 fliers — Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin — are expected to head home on Oct. 1 to complete the crew rotation sequence.
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Source: cbsnews.com