NASA names astronauts for SpaceX's Crew-9 mission to the ISS
NASA has named the four astronauts who will fly to the International Space Station on SpaceX's Crew-9 mission this summer.
The Crew-9 quartet consists of cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos and three NASA astronauts: Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson, NASA revealed in an announcement on Wednesday afternoon (Jan. 31).
Cardman will command the mission, Hague will be its pilot and Wilson and Gorbunov will serve as mission specialists.
Crew-9 will launch atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida's Space Coast no earlier than this August. A final target date has not yet been announced.
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Crew-9 will be the first spaceflight for both Cardman and Gorbunov, who were selected by their nations' space agencies in 2017 and 2018, respectively.
Hague has two space missions under his belt, including a long-term trip to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019. That flight lifted off about five months after an aborted ISS launch, during which a rocket problem forced the Russian Soyuz spacecraft carrying Hague and cosmonaut Alexey Ovchinin to make an emergency landing. (Both were unhurt.) Hague has spent a total of 203 days in space.
Wilson has racked up a total of 42 days off Earth across three orbital missions, all of which flew aboard the space shuttle Discovery. The most recent of those three flights, STS-131, launched in April 2010.
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As its name suggests, Crew-9 will be the ninth operational astronaut mission that SpaceX flies to the ISS for NASA using the company's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule.
It will overlap briefly with Crew-8, whose four astronauts are scheduled to launch toward the orbiting lab no earlier than Feb. 22.
