Resident Weekly

A Exclusive Current Affairs Platform

Science

NASA Selects Astronauts for SpaceX’s Crew-9 ISS Mission

The four astronauts that will travel on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission this summer to the International Space Station have been named by NASA.

NASA announced on Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 31) that Zena Cardman, Nick Hague, Stephanie Wilson, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos make up the Crew-9 quartet.

Wilson and Gorbunov will be the mission specialists, Hague will pilot the mission, and Cardman will serve as its commander.

August is the latest date that Crew-9 will launch from Florida’s Space Coast on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The exact deadline has not yet been disclosed.

Cardman and Gorbunov, who were chosen by their respective countries’ space agencies in 2017 and 2018, will be making their spaceflight debuts with Crew-9.

Hague has completed two space flights, the most recent of which was a lengthy stay on the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019. That voyage took place around five months after the Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin was forced to perform an emergency landing due to a rocket malfunction after an attempted ISS launch. (Neither suffered any injuries.) Hague has logged 203 days in space overall.

Wilson has completed three orbital trips, all of which were carried out on the space shuttle Discovery, for a total of 42 days off Earth. Of all three flights, STS-131 was the most recent, having taken off in April 2010.

Crew-9, as its name implies, will be SpaceX’s ninth operational crew mission, utilizing the company’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule, to the International Space Station (ISS) on behalf of NASA.

Crew-8, whose four astronauts are expected to launch toward the orbiting lab no early than February 22, will momentarily overlap with it.

error: Content is protected !!