SpaceX’s two-person Crew-9 mission will arrive at the International Space Station (ISS) today (Sept. 29), and you can watch the action live.
Crew-9’s Crew Dragon capsule, named Freedom, is scheduled to dock with the ISS today at 5:30 p.m. EDT (2130 GMT). You can watch the meeting live NASA+ and the agency’s website, beginning at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT). Space.com will also carry the feed if NASA makes it available.
Coverage will continue with the hatch opening and ISS crew welcome remarks, which are expected at 7:15 pm EDT (2315 GMT) and 7:40 pm EDT (2340 GMT), respectively.
Crew-9 launched Saturday afternoon (Sept. 28) from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, sending NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Alexander Korbunov into orbit.
Related: SpaceX Crew-9 Spaceflight: Live Updates
It was the first human spaceflight from SLC-40. Haig, a colonel in the U.S. Space Force, became the first active-duty member of the relatively new branch of the military to reach space.
Crew-9 is notable in another way. SpaceX Crew Dragon capsules normally carry four people to the International Space Station, but NASA cut Crew-9’s astronaut manifest in half to save seats for the two people who need to go home.
Those twins — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — arrived at the ISS in June on the first crew flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule. Their mission was supposed to last 10 days or more, but the Starliner encountered propulsion problems in orbit, and NASA extended the capsule’s stay on the ISS to investigate the problem.
The company eventually decided it was too risky to bring Wilmore and Williams home on the Starliner. So capsule sep. 7 returned to Earth decommissioned, and its former crew would return home to Freedom with Hack and Korbunov when Crew-9 was terminated in February 2025.
Wilmore and Williams are two of nine astronauts currently living on the ISS. The other seven are NASA’s Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominique, Jeanette Epps, and Donald Pettit, and astronauts Alexander Grebenkin, Alexei Ovchinin, and Ivan Wagner.
Barrett, Dominik, Epps and Grebenkin brought SpaceX’s Crew-8 mission back in March. If all goes according to plan, they will return to Earth shortly after Crew-9 arrives.
