Miami – NASA and SpaceX are monitoring the development of the newly formed Tropical Storm Helene on Tuesday, which meteorologists predict will hit the west coast of Florida (USA) on Thursday and, therefore, could force a change in the launch date of the Crew-9 mission.
This manned mission is scheduled to take off towards the International Space Station (ISS) on Thursday afternoon from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, on the east coast of Florida, if weather conditions allow.
And Helene could even become a major hurricane, that is, category 3 or more on the Saffir-Simpson scale, with a maximum of 5, by Thursday, when it is expected to reach the west coast of Florida and bad weather will be recorded in a large part of this peninsula.
The US space agency is scheduled to put the Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon capsule on top, both from SpaceX, on the launch pad today for the ignition of the engines and the final tests for the launch scheduled for 2:05 p.m. local time (18:05 GMT) on Thursday.
On Monday, NASA and SpaceX successfully completed the final checks prior to takeoff of what will be the ninth rotation of crew members on the ISS in ships from Elon Musk’s company, according to the space agency.
The two Crew-9 crew members will be astronaut Nick Hague, commander of the mission, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, a specialist, who will remain for about five months in the orbital laboratory carrying out research and a space walk.
This mission was planned to take off with four crew members, but in the end it will do so with only Hague and Gorbunov in order to bring Barry ‘Butch’ Wilmore and Sunita ‘Suni’ Williams, the astronauts who travelled to the ISS aboard the Starliner capsule, on the return trip of the Dragon.
At the beginning of this month, the Boeing ship returned without its two crew members due to technical problems that could not be resolved and that led NASA to keep Wilmore and Williams on the space station until February 2025, which is when the Dragon is scheduled to return.
One of the changes that arise from this unsuccessful Starliner test mission is the change of the launch platform for Crew-9.
From the one planned at Complex 39A of the Kennedy Space Center, it has moved to Complex 40 of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which will thus host the launch of a manned mission for the first time.
