It appears that SpaceX’s upcoming astronaut mission will not launch this month.
Crew-9 was scheduled to launch on August 18, marking SpaceX’s ninth voyage to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. But the agency stated today, August 6, that it has been rescheduled to no sooner than September 24.
“This adjustment allows more time for mission managers to finalize return planning for the agency’s Boeing Crew Flight Test currently docked to the orbiting laboratory,” NASA stated in a statement this afternoon.
The inaugural astronaut trip of Boeing’s new Starliner capsule is called the Crew Flight Test (CFT). Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore from NASA were launched on June 5 and will spend a week on the International Space Station.
But Starliner is still up there. On route to the orbiting laboratory, the capsule encountered a number of problems, chief among them being the failure of five of its twenty-eight reaction control system thrusters. Since then, members of the CFT team have been researching the issue in an effort to ascertain whether and when Starliner would be able to safely bring Williams and Wilmore back to Earth.
That work is still in progress.
In today’s update, NASA officials stated, “NASA and Boeing continue to evaluate the spacecraft’s readiness, and no decisions have been made regarding Starliner’s return.”
“With agency leadership to discuss ongoing operations, including NASA’s Crew-9, Crew-8, and Crew Flight Test missions,” NASA will hold a press conference at 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT).
SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission, which brought four people to the International Space Station (ISS) for a roughly six-month stay in early March, is preparing to return to Earth.
Commander Zena Cardman, pilot Nick Hague, mission specialist Stephanie Wilson, and mission specialist Alexsandr Gorbunov make up the Crew-9 astronauts. Cardman, Hague, and Wilson are astronauts from NASA, while Gorbunov is a representative of Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.