4 astronauts will relocate a SpaceX spacecraft on the area station on Sunday (Nov. 3), and you’ll watch the occasion stay.
The SpaceX Crew-9 astronauts, together with two crew members previously aboard Boeing Starliner, will transfer their Crew Dragon on the International Space Station. ISS procedures dictate that all astronauts assigned to a spacecraft climb on board for relocations, on the tiny chance something arises that would force the group to come early back to Earth.
Live coverage begins at 6:15 a.m. EST (1315 GMT) courtesy of NASA+, and possibly the agency’s YouTube if NASA shares it there as effectively.
Related: SpaceX’s Crew-9 Dragon spacecraft arrives at ISS to help bring Starliner astronauts home (video)
Should the event go to plan, the four astronauts will temporarily undock from the ISS’s Harmony module at 6:35 a.m. EST (1335 GMT) and redock at 7:18 a.m. EST (1418 GMT), moving from the forward-facing port to the space-facing port.
On board will be NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, both originally assigned to Crew-9, along with former Starliner astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams of NASA.
The Starliner duo were reassigned to Crew-9 after NASA determined it was too great of a risk to bring them home safely aboard the Boeing spacecraft to conclude their test ISS mission. Starliner experienced unexpected propulsion issues during docking with the ISS June 6 and the cause and remedy could not be pinned down after nearly two months of troubleshooting.
NASA originally planned to launch two other agency astronauts, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, aboard Crew-9. They were removed from the mission to leave two empty seats for Williams and Wilmore to return to Earth with the rest of Crew-9, in February 2025. (Wilson and Cardman remain eligible for future ISS missions.)
The Crew Dragon relocation will make room for a cargo variant of the spacecraft, also called Dragon, to dock at the vacant Harmony port after a scheduled Monday (Nov. 4) launch.
