As Florida braces for the arrival of Tropical Storm Helene, the launch of NASA’s Crew-9 mission from the Kennedy Space Center has once again been delayed. The launch of two astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) was originally set for Thursday, September 26, but has now been pushed back to 1:17 p.m. ET Saturday, September 28.
“The change allows teams to complete a rehearsal of launch day activities Tuesday night with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, which rolled to Space Launch Complex-40 earlier in the day. Following rehearsal activities, the integrated system will move back to the hangar ahead of any potential storm activity,” NASA wrote in an update. “Although Tropical Storm Helene is moving through the Gulf of Mexico and expected to impact the Florida panhandle, the storm system is large enough that high winds and heavy rain are expected in the Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island regions on Florida’s east coast.”
The Crew-9 mission has been rather unlucky so far, having been delayed multiple times. The most recent delay to the launch was to give more time to prepare at Kennedy’s Space Launch Complex 40, which is frequently used for launching SpaceX Falcon 9 rockets such as for Starlink missions, but which has not previously been used for a human spaceflight launch.
Before that, the launch was delayed by more than a month while a decision was made about the first crewed test flight of the Boeing Starliner. Following ongoing issues with the Starliner’s thrusters, NASA decided to keep the two astronauts from that test flight on the space station and bring them back to Earth as part of Crew-9 instead. That required the Crew-9 launch to be delayed until the Starliner left the station and freed up a docking slot.
The two crew members who will travel on the outward leg of Crew-9 are NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, who will join former Starliner crew members Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of NASA to form the complete Crew-9. They will perform a short handover with the previous crew, Crew-8, who are then expected to leave the space station on October 1.
The ISS has been busy with comings and goings recently, as this week also saw the departure of crew members Tracy C. Dyson of NASA and Oleg Kononenko and Nikolai Chub of Roscosmos. They traveled home on a Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft and landed safely in a remote region of Kazakhstan on Monday, September 23.