SpaceX Announces Launch Date for Crew 9 with 2-Person Crew from Space Coast

BREVARD COUNTY, FLORIDA – SpaceX has released a new potential launch date for its Crew 9 mission.

To ensure everything is ready for liftoff, NASA and SpaceX announced in a press release Thursday that the new launch date is set for September 25 at 2:28 p.m. NASA’s Commercial Crew Program manager Steve Stich had originally said the earliest launch would be August 18 during a press conference in July.

In the event of further delays, additional launch opportunities are available from Thursday, September 26 through Saturday, September 28. Currently, the weather forecast for the scheduled launch day indicates a 60% chance of rain at Cape Canaveral.

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Crew 9 will be SpaceX’s ninth crew rotation mission under NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The launch will mark the first time a crewed space mission has launched from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The announcement follows the successful launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket that sent five communications satellites into orbit on September 12.

The nine-member crew is already preparing for launch. NASA astronaut commander Nick Hague and Roscosmos mission specialist cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will spend the next two weeks in quarantine at the Johnson Space Center in Houston until September 20, when they will travel to Kennedy Space Center.

Once in space, Hague and Gorbunov will join the crew aboard the International Space Station, including astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, who have been aboard the space station since June as part of Boeing’s Starliner mission.

SpaceX changed that mission from a four-person crew to a two-person crew, so the Dragon capsule could bring Wilmore and Williams home when it returned to Earth.

Once in orbit, the crew will spend approximately five months in the orbiting laboratory and return in February 2025.

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