NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov are making ready to release at the company’s SpaceX Workforce-9 project to the World Area Station.
The flight is the 9th team rotation project with SpaceX to the station underneath NASA’s Business Workforce Program. The duo will raise off aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, which up to now flew NASA’s SpaceX Workforce-4, Axiom Challenge 2 and Axiom Challenge 3, from Release Advanced 40 at Cape Canaveral Area Drive Station in Florida.
As soon as aboard the distance station, Hague and Gorbunov will grow to be participants of the Expedition 72 team and carry out analysis, era demonstrations, and upkeep actions. The pair will sign up for NASA astronauts Don Petitt, Butch Wilmore, Suni Williams, in addition to Roscosmos cosmonauts Alexey Ovchinin and Ivan Vagner.
Wilmore and Williams, who introduced aboard the Starliner spacecraft in June, will fly house with Hague and Gorbunov in February 2025.
Release arrangements are underway, and groups are operating to combine the spacecraft and the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, together with checkouts of a 2d flight rocket booster for the project. The built-in spacecraft and rocket will then be rolled to the pad and raised to the vertical place for a dry get dressed practice session with the team and an built-in static hearth check previous to release.
Nick Hague will function team commander for Workforce-9, making this his 3rd release and 2d project to the distance station. Throughout his first release in October 2018, Hague and his crewmate, Roscosmos’ Alexey Ovchinin, skilled a rocket booster failure, leading to an in-flight, post-launch abort, ballistic re-entry, and secure touchdown of their Soyuz MS-10 spacecraft. 5 months later, Hague introduced aboard Soyuz MS-12 and served as a flight engineer aboard the distance station throughout Expeditions 59 and 60. Hague has spent 203 days in house and carried out 3 spacewalks to improve house station energy programs and set up a docking adapter for business spacecraft.
Born in Belleville, Kansas, Hague earned a bachelor’s stage in Astronautical Engineering from the US Air Drive Academy and a grasp’s stage in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Era in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Hague used to be decided on as an astronaut via NASA in 2013. An active-duty colonel within the U.S. Area Drive, Hague finished a developmental rotation on the Protection Division and served because the Area Drive’s director of check and analysis from 2020 to 2022. In August 2022, Hague resumed tasks at NASA, operating at the Boeing Starliner Program till this flight task.
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Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will embark on his first go back and forth to the distance station as a project specialist for Workforce-9. Born in Zheleznogorsk, Kursk area, Russia, he studied engineering with {qualifications} in spacecraft and higher phases from the Moscow Aviation Institute. Gorbunov graduated from the army division with a distinctiveness in running and repairing airplane, helicopters, and airplane engines. Ahead of his variety as a cosmonaut in 2018, he labored as an engineer for Rocket Area Corp. Energia and supported shipment spacecraft launches from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Gorbunov will function a flight engineer throughout Expedition 71/72 aboard the distance station.
After liftoff, Dragon will boost up to roughly 17,500 mph to dock with the distance station.
As soon as in orbit, flight regulate groups from NASA’s Challenge Keep watch over Heart on the company’s Johnson Area Heart in Houston and the SpaceX project regulate in Hawthorne, California, will track a sequence of automated maneuvers that may information Dragon to the forward-facing port of the station’s Solidarity module. The spacecraft is designed to dock autonomously, however the team can take regulate and pilot manually if vital.
After docking, Expedition 71 will welcome Hague and Gorbunov throughout the station and habits a number of days of handover actions with the departing astronauts of NASA’s SpaceX Workforce-8 project. After a handover duration, NASA astronauts Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin of Workforce-8 will undock from the distance station and splash down off the coast of Florida.
Workforce-9 will habits new clinical analysis to organize for human exploration past low Earth orbit and get advantages humanity on Earth. Experiments come with the have an effect on of flame habits on Earth, learning cells and platelets throughout long-duration spaceflight, and a B diet that would scale back Spaceflight-Related Neuro-ocular Syndrome. They’ll additionally paintings on experiments that get advantages existence on Earth, like learning the physics of supernova explosions and tracking the results of various moister therapies on vegetation grown aboard the station. Those are only some of over 200 clinical experiments and era demonstrations happening throughout their project.
Whilst aboard the orbiting laboratory, Workforce-9 will welcome two Dragon spacecraft, together with NASA’s SpaceX’s thirty first business resupply products and services project and NASA’s SpaceX Workforce-10, and two Roscosmos-led shipment deliveries on Development 90 and 91.
In February, Hague, Gorbunov, Wilmore, and Williams will climb aboard Dragon and autonomously undock, leave the distance station, and re-enter Earth’s setting. After splashdown off Florida’s coast, a SpaceX restoration vessel will pick out up the spacecraft and team, who then might be helicoptered again to shore.
Business team missions allow NASA to maximise use of the distance station, the place astronauts have lived and labored steadily for greater than 23 years checking out applied sciences, acting analysis, and growing the talents had to perform long term business locations in low Earth orbit, and discover further from Earth. Analysis carried out at the house station supplies advantages for other folks on Earth and paves the best way for long term long-duration journeys to the Moon and past thru NASA’s Artemis missions.
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