| Advertisement |
Sept. 29 (UPI) -- The team of the Dragon Crew-9 boarded the International Space Station after a successful docking Sunday evening, floating through a vestibule joining the two spacecraft. U.S. Space Force colonel and commander Nick Hauge, along with Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, were greeted by crew members already onboard the ISS, including NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.
"It's going to be an amazing expedition," Hague said during a press briefing at 7:40 p.m. EDT. "So, am really looking forward to getting to work up here."
Hague and Gorbunov held their welcome ceremony with the rest of the ISS crew surrounding them. Gorbunov greeted viewers in Russian.
Williams and Wilmore were effectively stranded onboard the ISS when the Boeing Starlilner, which brought them to the station in June, was deemed unsafe to carry them back to Earth because of problems with its directional thrusters. The pair's five-day mission was suddenly extended to eight months.
That resulted in Crew-9 reducing its team from four members to two to leave room for the stranded astronauts to have a ride home. Following their extended stay on the ISS, Williams and Wilmore will become part of Crew-9, and that Dragon module is scheduled to bring them, along with Hague and Gorbunov, home in February.
Starliner returned uncrewed to Earth safely earlier this month.
This is Hague's second trip to the ISS and Gorbunov's first. There are now 11 team members onboard the ISS.
The collective team aboard the ISS now enters a week long "handover period" to "set them up for success," mission control said not long after the pair entered the ISS. Crew-9 now becomes part of ISS Expedition 72.
The Crew-9 Dragon was launched on Saturday from Cape Canaveral in Florida. But just 11 hours after the launch, SpaceX announced it would suspend future launches until it could determine the cause of operational problems with Crew-9's second-stage rocket.
"After today's successful launch of Crew-9, Falcon 9's second stage was disposed in the ocean as planned, but experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause," SpaceX posted on X.
The ISS has been continually manned for 24 years with crews from all over the world.
