HOUSTON – NASA held a pair of news conferences Friday ahead of its Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station in August.
Crew-9 is currently expected to lift off from Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, carrying NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson, along with cosmonaut Alexsandr Gorbunov of Roscosmos, to the space station in a Dragon capsule.
During the first news conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston — meant to serve as a mission overview — NASA Commercial Crew Program Manager Steve Stich said the target launch date for Crew-9 will be no earlier than Aug. 18. He added Crew-10 will fly in February 2025 before Starliner 1 takes off in August 2025, with the latter launch “double-booked with Crew-11.”
According to Stitch, there remains outstanding certification work needed in order for SpaceX to launch a crewed mission from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Crew-9, however, will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center.
The next event featured the crew members themselves, followed by individual astronaut interviews. According to NASA, it was the last chance for media to speak with the spacefarers before they travel to Florida.
“We have a mission that is jam-packed full of science,” said Crew-9 Commander Zena Cardman. “Of course, the International Space Station is an orbiting laboratory, this is one of the most important things that we do and so for me — coming from a scientific background — I’m actually very much looking forward to doing research that’s very interdisciplinary, very integrated and is at varying levels of technological readiness. Some of it is very fundamental research, some of it is more of a technology demonstration. A lot of the science that we’ll be doing is actually research on ourselves as human bodies. The way that we respond to the spaceflight environment is incredibly interesting, we’re still looking to understand that as we move farther and farther beyond low-Earth orbit.”
Crew-9 will be SpaceX’s ninth crew rotation mission to the international space station.
SpaceX early Saturday plans to launch another Starlink mission from Florida with a Falcon 9 rocket, which have been grounded per the Federal Aviation Administration since a Starlink mission from California on July 11 suffered an anomaly and failed to deploy the satellites in the proper orbit.
Watch the news conferences again in the video player below or by clicking here:
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: