by SpaceX’s two-person Crew-9 mission arrives at the International Space Station (ISS) today (September 29) and you can watch the action live.
Crew-9’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, will dock with the ISS today around 5:30 PM EDT (9:30 GMT). You can watch the rendezvous live via NASA+ and the agency’s website, starting at 3:30 PM EDT (1930 GMT). Space.com will also offer the feed, if NASA makes it available.
Coverage will continue until the hatch opening and the ISS crew’s welcome speech, expected around 7:15 PM EDT (2315 GMT) and 7:40 PM EDT (2340 GMT), respectively.
Crew-9 launched Saturday afternoon (September 28) from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, sending NASA astronaut Nick Haag and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov into orbit.
Related: SpaceX Crew-9 astronaut mission: live updates
It was the very first manned space flight to take off from the SLC-40. And Haag, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, became the first active member of that relatively new military branch to reach space.
Crew-9 is also remarkable in another way. SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules usually carry four people to the International Space Station, but NASA cut Crew-9’s astronaut manifesto in half to free up seats for two people already in the orbiting lab and get a ride need to go home.
That duo – Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams – arrived at the ISS in June on the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Their mission was only supposed to last about ten days, but Starliner encountered problems with its thrusters in orbit, and NASA extended the capsule’s stay on the ISS to study the problem.
The agency ultimately decided it was too risky to bring Wilmore and Williams home on Starliner. So the capsule returned to Earth without a crew on September 7, and the former crew will come home to Freedom with Haag and Gorbunov when Crew-9 ends, in February 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are two of nine astronauts currently on board the ISS. The other seven are NASA’s Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps and Donald Pettit, and cosmonauts Alexander Grebenkin, Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.
Barratt, Dominick, Epps and Grebenkin conceived of SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission in March. If all goes according to plan, they will return to Earth not long after Crew-9 arrives.
