SpaceX launches Crew-9 astronauts from upgraded Florida pad to return Boeing Starliner crew home

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A unique SpaceX mission is underway.

A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station today (Sept. 28) at 1:17 p.m. EDT (1717 GMT), kicking off the Crew-9 astronaut mission to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA.

"That was a sweet ride," NASA astronaut Nick Hague, Crew-9's commander, radioed SpaceX's launch control after reaching orbit with crewmate Alexandr Gorbunov of Russia. The astronauts are will arrive at the ISS on Sunday, Sept. 29. You can follow the mission with our SpaceX mission live update page.

It was the first-ever astronaut launch from SLC-40 — SpaceX's first Florida launch pad, which has seen many uncrewed launches over the years. SpaceX and NASA spent two years upgrading the pad with a new crew launch tower, access arm and emergency escape slide to prepare it for astronaut flights.

The Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule on the Crew-9 flight, however, weren't new. SpaceX previously used the Falcon 9 rocket's first stage to launch an uncrewed Starlink mission. ABout 8 minutes after launch, the booster returned to Earth to land smoothly at SpaceX's Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The Dragon capsule has flown three other missions to the ISS: NASA's Crew-4 flight and two commercial trips for Axiom Space, Ax-2 and Ax-3.

The new launch pad isn't the only novelty to Crew-9. The mission's Dragon capsule, named Freedom, is ferrying just two people to the ISS instead of the usual four. Freedom is saving two seats for Crew-9's trip back down to Earth in February, because two NASA astronauts already up there need a ride home.

Those two spaceflyers are Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who arrived at the ISS in June on the first crewed mission of Boeing's Starliner capsule. Their groundbreaking flight was supposed to last just 10 days or so; however, Starliner suffered thruster issues in orbit, so NASA kept extending the mission to figure out how to deal with the anomaly.

Eventually, the agency decided to bring Starliner home uncrewed, which occurred without incident on Sept. 7.

Related: SpaceX's Crew-9 astronaut flight for NASA: How it turned into a rescue mission

Williams and Wilmore thus remained aboard the ISS, and Crew-9 was modified to make room for them on the trip back: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson were taken off the mission, leaving only Nick Hague and Aleksandr Gorbunov on the launch manifest.

"I think it was hard not to watch that rocket lift off without thinking, that's my rocket and that's my crew, but I also know that I'm not the only person who can think that," Cardman, Crew-9's original commander, said after watching the launch, her voice breaking at times. "There are many people who made this mission happen, and there are people on orbit who will be taking this capsule home, and it makes me very proud to know that I am one of many people who can say that's my crew."

NASA officials said they will work to reassign Cardman and Wilson to a new mission in the future.

"A crew change is not a small thing," NASA's Deputy Adminstrator Pam Melroy, a former space shuttle commander, said in a post-launch briefing. "It's very hard for Nick and Alex. It's also hard for Zena and Stephanie. But I think it's a reflection of the fact that human spaceflight is complicated and dynamic, and we need to be agile and focus on the mission."

Mission specialist Gorbunov works for Russia's space agency, Roscosmos. Hague, Crew-9's commander, is a veteran NASA astronaut and a colonel in the U.S. Space Force. In fact, that marks another first for Crew-9: No active member of the Space Force, which was established in December 2019, had launched on a space mission before, although NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins switched from the U.S. Air Force to the Space Force while aboard the ISS in 2020.

Crew-9 had been scheduled to launch on Thursday (Sept. 26), but the liftoff was pushed back two days due to Hurricane Helene. If all goes according to plan from here on out, Freedom will dock with the ISS on Sunday (Sept. 29) at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2230 GMT), and the hatches between the two spacecraft will open about an hour and 45 minutes later. You'll be able to watch both of those milestones live via NASA and here at Space.com if, as expected, the agency makes its stream available.

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As its name suggests, Crew-9 is the ninth long-duration astronaut mission to the ISS that SpaceX has launched for NASA.

Elon Musk's company also has six other orbital crewed flights under its belt — the Demo-2 test mission to the ISS in 2020, three flights to the orbiting lab for Houston company Axiom Space and two free-flying efforts funded and commanded by tech billionaire Jared Isaacman. The more recent of the Isaacman-led flights, Polaris Dawn, occurred just last month.

Like SpaceX, Boeing holds a multibillion-dollar deal to ferry NASA astronauts to and from the ISS. But it's unclear when Starliner will be cleared to start flying operational crewed missions, given the problems it experienced on the recent test flight.

Mission extensions and manifest shuffling aren't unheard of on ISS astronaut flights, by the way. For example, NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin launched to the ISS aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft for a supposed six-month stay in September 2022. Their Soyuz sprang a leak a few months later, however, and the trio didn't end up coming back to Earth until September 2023, on a replacement Soyuz that Russia launched empty to accommodate their homecoming.

Editor's note:  This story was updated to include post-launch comments from NASA' Pam Melroy. SpaceX's Crew-9 astronauts will arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday, Sept. 29, starting at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). Docking is scheduled for 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT). Follow our SpaceX missions update page to watch the Crew-9 docking live.