Good morning, friends. It’s your Space Coast correspondent James Sparvero and over the weekend, perhaps as some of you were enjoying a beautiful day at the beach, the next astronauts launching to the International Space Station landed at Kennedy Space Center.
Crew-9, of course, was supposed to be a team of four. However, when NASA ultimately decided Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams would not be riding the troubled Boeing Starliner capsule home, Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson lost their seats to make room for bringing home Butch and Suni next year.
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Saturday, the remainder of Crew-9, Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, addressed whether they feel any extra responsibility given their sudden, new objective of being a lifeline for additional crew members.
“There’ve been a lot of changes to our particular spacecraft, crew, but the mission really hasn’t changed,” Hague said. “The mission hasn’t changed for 2 1/2 decades. It’s to get up to the station and do research, and that mission is bigger than any one crew. So we respond to the dynamic nature of what we need to do, and we’re asked to step up to that.”
Hague’s career has included a lot not going to plan as well. In 2018, during what was supposed to be his first spaceflight, he and his Russian crew mate were ejected from a Soyuz rocket after a launch failure. In my mind, I can still vividly see the video inside the capsule of Hague and the cosmonaut being jerked round just before they were safely jettisoned.
On a much lighter note, once Hague did make it to space on his following mission, I watched his interview with Brad Pitt. I didn’t like the movie Brad was promoting at the time (”Ad Astra”), but I did like the questions he asked Nick. Some people commented it was even better than an interview with a real journalist!
A flight readiness review for Crew-9 is scheduled today before the launch happens as soon as 2:05 p.m. on Thursday. It’s going to be the first crewed launch from SpaceX’s Pad 40!
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👋 Here’s a little bit more about me.
Little did I know when watching Apollo 13 in the third grade that 20 years later, I was destined for a thrilling career as your Space Coast multimedia journalist.
Chemistry and biology weren’t so interesting to me in high school science, but I loved my Earth and Space class (Thanks, Mr. Lang).
Then in 2016, I traded Capitol correspondent in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, for space correspondent. I’m proud that my first live report at News 6 happened to be the first time SpaceX landed a Falcon 9 booster on a barge. What seems so routine now was a really big deal that day in our newsroom!
From there, I’ve covered the Commercial Crew program and the return of human spaceflight to Kennedy Space Center (Demo-2 launched on my 33rd birthday!)
Now, as our coverage looks forward to missions to the moon and Mars, I often tell others I have the best job in local news. Because after all I’ve seen so far, I think I would be bored working somewhere else. I even bought a house near the Cape with a great view to the north so I never miss a launch even when I’m not working.
After eight years on the beat, though, I still consider myself a young space reporter and I always look forward to learning something new with every assignment.
Have a great launch into the rest of your week!