NEW YORK, March 18. /TASS/. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying Crew-9 members, including Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov, has undocked from the International Space Station, according to a broadcast on the NASA website.
The Crew Dragon is expected to splash down off Florida’s coast later in the day. Apart from Gorbunov, NASA astronaut Nick Hague and members of the first Boeing Starliner crewed mission, astronauts Sunita Williams and Barry Eugene "Butch" Wilmore, will also return to Earth.
Wilmore and Williams arrived at the International Space Station on the Starliner spaceship launched by the Boeing Corporation on June 5. It was Boeing’s first manned launch to the orbital outpost. Wilmore and Williams were initially expected to return on June 18 but due to technical issues with the Starliner’s thrusters, their return was postponed first to June 16 and then indefinitely. Eventually, NASA decided that the two astronauts would go back to Earth together with SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission in the spring of 2025.
In July 2022, Russia’s Roscosmos State Space Corporation and NASA signed a seat-swap agreement allowing Russian cosmonauts to fly to the ISS on US spacecraft and US astronauts to travel aboard Russian spaceships. Maxim Kharlamov, head of the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center, told TASS in January that the cross-flights program had been extended until 2026 inclusive.