SpaceX ship docks at space station for stranded astronauts

The SpaceX Dragon shuttle NASA is using for its Crew-9 mission successfully locked onto the International Space Station on Sunday night, the space agency reported. The craft’s mission is to retrieve two astronauts overdue for their return to Earth. The spacecraft lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Saturday with only two passengers aboard. The two passengers—American astronaut Nick Hague and Russian cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov—will spend five months aboard the International Space Station before heading back to Earth early next year.

Isn’t this the craft that’s bringing home those two stranded astronauts? Yes. NASA originally planned for American astronauts Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams, who traveled to the space station on NASA’s Crew-8 mission, to return to Earth earlier this year. But their spacecraft developed issues on the flight up to the space station in June.

After analyzing the situation, NASA decided not to send the astronauts back down to earth on that spacecraft. Instead, the agency booted two astronauts—Americans Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson—from its original Crew-9 lineup to make space for Wilmore and Williams to come home aboard that spacecraft. NASA plans to bring Wimore and Williams back to Earth in February.

Dig deeper: Listen to Bonnie Pritchett’s report on The World and Everything in It podcast about how NASA researchers are preparing to, eventually, send astronauts to Mars.