A SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft caught up with the International Space Station and moved in for docking Sunday.
A day after launching from the Kennedy Space Center, a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft caught up with the International Space Station and moved in for docking Sunday, bringing a NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the outpost to join two Starliner astronauts for a five-month tour of duty.
The rendezvous came amid word from SpaceX that it’s suspending Falcon 9 launches while engineers work to figure out what caused the crew’s Falcon 9 upper stage to misfire Saturday, after the Crew Dragon was released to fly on its own, resulting in an off-target re-entry over the Pacific Ocean.
SpaceX said in a post on the social media platform X that the second stage « experienced an off-nominal deorbit burn. As a result, the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause. »
It was the second Falcon 9 upper stage anomaly in less than three months and the third failure counting a first stage landing mishap. It’s not yet known what impact, if any, the latest problem might have on downstream flights, including two high-priority October launches to send NASA and European Space Agency probes on voyages to Jupiter and an asteroid.
But the anomaly had no impact on the Crew Dragon’s 28-hour rendezvous with the space station, and the ferry ship, carrying commander Nick Hague and cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, docked at the lab’s forward port at 5:30 p.m. EDT as the two spacecraft sailed 265 miles above southern Africa.
Standing by to welcome Hague and Gorbunov aboard were Starliner commander Barry « Butch » Wilmore and pilot Sunita Williams, now serving as commander of the space station, along with Soyuz MS-26/72S commander Aleksey Ovchinin, Ivan Vagner and NASA astronaut Don Pettit.
Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore and Williams will replace Crew 8 commander Matthew Dominick, Mike Barratt, Jeanette Epps and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin when they return to Earth around Oct. 7 to wrap up a 217-day stay in space.
Wilmore and Williams a mission expected to last a little more than a week, on June 5. During rendezvous with the space station the day after launch, multiple helium leaks in the ship’s propulsion system were detected and five maneuvering jets failed to operate properly.
NASA and Boeing spent the next three months carrying out tests and analyses to determine if the Starliner could safely bring its crew back to Earth.
