KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – The next crew rotation to the International Space Station will launch with a pair of open seats to make room for the stuck Starliner astronauts.
Nick Hague and Alex Gorbunov arrived at Kennedy Space Center on Saturday ahead of Thursday’s SpaceX Crew-9 launch. Like Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been on the space station since June, Hague’s career has also had some big ups and downs.
In 2018, Hague escaped a launch failure when he was riding a Russian Soyuz rocket during his first spaceflight mission.
Hague was asked if he feels any extra responsibility now that his Dragon capsule will be a lifeline for Wilmore and Williams, too.
“There’ve been a lot of changes to our particular spacecraft, crew, but the mission really hasn’t changed,” the Crew-9 commander said. “The mission hasn’t changed for 2 1/2 decades. It’s to get up to the station and do research, and that mission is bigger than any one crew.”
Once Hague made it to space on his mission following the 2018 failure, he talked to Brad Pitt during a NASA interview.
Pitt was playing an astronaut in his latest movie, and as Nick spent 200 days in space, he asked him about getting homesick. Wilmore and Williams will be missing the holidays due to having a new flight home.
“Being apart from your family is a challenge,” Hague said in 2019. “One of the luxuries I think we have of working in low-Earth orbit, close to the Earth, is the amount of connectivity that we have. The ability to make phone calls, check in on a routine basis.”
Crew-9 is scheduled for launch no earlier than 1:17 p.m. Saturday. The launch will happen at Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. It’s the first time a human spaceflight mission has taken off from that launch complex.
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