According to the BBC, the Dragon capsule with two empty seats for astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams approached the station yesterday.
The Dragon capsule was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida with a Falcon 9 rocket as part of SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.
In the statement made yesterday by the American Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), NASA astronauts Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov from the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) studied issues such as blood clotting, humidity in plants grown in space, and changes in astronauts’ vision in space, within the scope of their 5-month mission at the ISS. It was stated that they would conduct more than 200 scientific research.
It is aimed to bring the two astronauts, Hague and Gorbunov, to Earth in February 2025, who were sent to the space station for a short time after the completion of the Crew-9 mission, but have been stranded on the ISS since the beginning of June as a result of the malfunction of Boeing’s Starliner shuttle.
BOEING’S STARLINER SHUTTLE WAS MALFUNCTIONAL
After two postponements, Boeing sent the Starliner shuttle, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams, into space for the first time on June 5.
Despite the investigations carried out on the shuttle, which detected a helium leak, the source of the problem could not be found and the return of the vehicle to Earth was postponed 4 times.
Deciding that it was too risky to bring the two astronauts back to Earth with Boeing’s faulty capsule, NASA announced that they would be kept in space until February 2025. Thus, the test flight, which was supposed to last a week for astronauts, will last more than 8 months.
NASA later announced that the Starliner shuttle returned to Earth without a crew.
