Efforts to ‘rescue’ two stranded NASA astronauts entered their final leg of preparation this week ahead of a scheduled SpaceX launch. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch ‘no earlier than September 25’ aboard a Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. The spacecraft is expected to return home in February with Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams finally on board.

“The crew will lift off from Launch Complex 40 from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft. Hague and Gorbonov will become members of the Expedition 72 crew aboard the station,” a press note from the space agency explained recently.

Hague has so far spent 203 days in space since he was first selected as a NASA astronaut in 2013. This will be his third launch and second mission to the space station. 

Hague and Gorbunov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively, as part of the reduced two-crew member flight aboard a SpaceX Dragon.

The duo will join Wilmore and Williams as well as three other astronauts at the ISS for about six months. During this time the group will “conduct scientific research in microgravity and complete a range of operational activities before returning home”.

Hague completed his astronaut training in July 2015 as part of NASA’s 21st astronaut class. He was , which launched in His next spaceflight occurred in 2019, when he joined three of his classmates – NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Christina Koch, and Andrew Morgan – aboard the International Space Station for Expeditions 59 and 60.

He was born and raised in Kansas before earning degrees United States Air Force Academy in Colorado and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He attended the US Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards Air Force Base in California. Hague’s military career has taken him to New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., and included a five-month deployment to Iraq. Hague transferred from the Air Force to the U.S. Space Force in 2020 after serving as the Space Force’s director of test and evaluation at the Pentagon.