Eight times during the past four years, SpaceX has provided a regular astronaut transportation service for NASA from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Its next flight to the International Space Station, scheduled to launch on Saturday, will not be like the previous eight.
There will be two, not four, astronauts aboard. Two other astronauts who were assigned to the mission will remain on Earth. And the mission, named Crew-9, will launch from a different launchpad.
The shuffling is a consequence of difficulties with a different spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner, over the summer.
“The word that comes to mind for this flight is ‘agility,’” Steve Stich, the manager for NASA’s commercial crew program, said during a prelaunch news conference on Friday.
Here’s what you need to know about Saturday’s launch, and why it’s unlike other recent NASA astronaut missions.
When is the launch and how can I watch it?
Crew-9 is scheduled to launch from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Saturday at 1:17 p.m. Eastern time. NASA will provide coverage of the launch beginning at about 9:10 a.m., or you can watch it in the video player above.
Forecasts call for a 55 percent chance of favorable weather. There remains a tail of clouds from Hurricane Helene that could produce rain or lightning over Central Florida.
“That’s going to kind of get stuck on top of us,” said Brian Cizek, a weather officer at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
Should bad weather or other problems occur, backup opportunities are available on Sunday at 12:54 p.m. and Monday at 12:32 p.m.
The launch had been scheduled for Thursday, but with strong winds and heavy rains from Helene blanketing Florida, the launch was pushed back until the skies cleared.
If Crew-9 launches on Saturday, it is to arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday at 5:30 p.m.
Why is this flight unlike earlier SpaceX launches for NASA?
In June, two NASA astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, flew to the space station in a test flight of Boeing’s Starliner vehicle.
But problems with Starliner’s propulsion system led NASA officials to conclude that Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore should remain on the space station when Starliner returned to Earth this month.
The SpaceX spacecraft, Crew Dragon, will be used for the Crew-9 flight and serve as the ride home for Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore next year. Two seats will be left empty for them during the trip up this week.
That’s a change from the regular flights to the space station that SpaceX has conducted for NASA since 2020. Twice a year, a Falcon 9 rocket would launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, placing into orbit a Crew Dragon spacecraft with four astronauts aboard.
The Crew Dragon would then dock at the International Space Station and the four astronauts would join the space station crew. About six months later, the same four astronauts would get back into the Crew Dragon and head home to Earth.
Ken Bowersox, the associate administrator of NASA’s space operations mission directorate, acknowledged that the shuffling does add some risk that something could go wrong.
“When the crew gets shuffled just a few weeks before the launch, you have to take some extra steps to make sure they’re trained for all of the technical things that they do during their mission,” he said in an interview. “There’s less margin if things start to go wrong, and so there’s risk there.”
Who will be on board?
Nick Hague of NASA is the mission commander and Aleksandr Gorbunov of Russia will be a mission specialist.
Mr. Hague, who is also a colonel in the United States Space Force, has launched toward space twice before, although he made it to space only once. In 2018, he and Aleksei Ovchinin of Russia launched in a Russian Soyuz rocket that failed about two minutes into the flight.
An emergency abort system saved their lives, carrying their capsule to a harrowing but safe landing. Mr. Hague was then assigned to a later Soyuz mission, which launched in 2019 without problem. He spent 203 days aboard the International Space Station.
Crew-9 will be Mr. Gorbunov’s first trip to space. Before his selection in 2018 as an astronaut by Roscosmos, the state corporation that runs Russia’s space program, he worked as an engineer for a Russian rocket company.
Who was bumped off Crew-9?
Two other NASA astronauts, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, were also originally assigned to the Crew-9 mission. Ms. Cardman was set to be the flight’s commander.
Ms. Cardman, Ms. Wilson, Mr. Hague and Mr. Gorbunov trained together for this mission for about a year and a half.
But for there to be room for Ms. Williams and Mr. Wilmore to return in the Crew Dragon, two of the seats have to be left empty for the ride up to space. NASA said Joseph Acaba, the chief NASA astronaut, decided that Mr. Hague, who was to be the pilot, should be the commander because he had flown to space before. This was to be Ms. Cardman’s first trip to space.
Ms. Wilson had been a crew member on three space shuttle missions to the space station more than a decade ago, but this was to be her first long-duration stay in orbit.
“I can really relate to how they must be feeling, but we’ll fly them,” Mr. Bowersox said. “We’ll find them slots in the future.”
Why the change in launchpads?
Until now, all of SpaceX’s launches of astronauts occurred at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. But SpaceX has also used a launchpad at the neighboring Cape Canaveral Space Force Station to launch satellites and space station cargo missions.
A couple of years ago, SpaceX decided to add a tower at its Cape Canaveral site that would allow astronauts to fly from there. That adds flexibility to SpaceX’s launch plans, which now include private astronaut missions, and serving as a backup site in case of damage to the Kennedy launchpad.
Crew-9 was to have launched from the Kennedy Space Center, but it was moved because of delays — it could not launch until after Starliner departed and freed up a docking port — and the need to prepare this launchpad for next month’s launch of NASA’s Europa Clipper robotic mission to Jupiter.
Why is a Russian astronaut riding in an American spacecraft?
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, many aspects of its cooperation with the United States have foundered, but space is an exception. Russia’s space agency and NASA are the main partners collaborating on the International Space Station, and managers would like their astronauts to be familiar with all of the systems on the space station.
That means NASA and Roscosmos have been trading seats on their spacecraft. Tracy Dyson of NASA just returned to Earth from the space station in a Soyuz following the launch of her colleague, Don Pettit, on a different Soyuz that brought up a new crew.
The Crew-8 mission was the first to carry a Russian astronaut, Alexander Grebenkin.
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