NASA astronaut and U.S. Space Force colonel Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexandr Gorbunov floated aboard the International Space Station(ISS) following the opening of the hatches between their Crew Dragon Freedom and the ISS. Freedom docked to the orbital lab's Harmony module at 2130 UTC, on Sunday Sept. 29, as both spacecraft soar about 418 kilometers over the Coral Sea.
The Crew Dragon duo were welcomed aboard at about 2315 UTC, by the Epedition 72 crew and the stranded Boeing Starliner crew Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams who will be hitching a ride home in Freedom in February with Hague and Gorbunov.
Crew-9 launched Saturday afternoon (Sept. 28), the first human crew launch from Space Launch Complex-40 (SLC-40) at Florida's Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, sending Hague and Gorbunov into orbit.
Crew-9 Dragon makes it 2 SpaceX spacecraft currently docked to the space station. NASA's Michael Barratt, Matthew Dominick, Jeanette Epps, and cosmonaut Alexander Grebenkin came up with SpaceX's Crew-8 mission in March. They will be head back to Earth in a few weeks.
With Hague and Gorbunov aboard, there are now 11 total in the space station including NASA's Donald Pettit, and cosmonauts Aleksey Ovchinin and Ivan Wagner.