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NASA’s Crew-9 Mission Ends with Dolphin Greeting

March 19, 2025

The NASA Crew-9 Mission which originally began as a 8-day test flight, but ended in a 9-month stay aboard the International Space Station, ended on march 18^th with a storybook finale which included a splashdown greeted by dolphins.

The mission however was possibly a miscall by NASA who scheduled two astronauts for a brief one week flight test, to check the new Boeing Starliner, instead of the usual 6-month rotation that all crewed ISS missions normally take.  As it turned out, the Starliner’s thrusters failed and had to abort the ISS without crew.  However, this result would have been the same if the the two astronauts were scheduled for a typical 6-month mission which also included the Starliner test flight.  Further, it is criticized that a full 6-month mission would have more completely tested the Starliner. ¹

As events unfolded, the mission developed into a story episode about “stranded astronauts” yet this could all have been avoided if they were correctly assigned a 6-month mission.  Were the two astronauts really stranded ?  Not really, if you realize a Soyuz spacecraft was always docked to the ISS the whole time serving as an emergency lifeboat.  The story continues to unfold in that they were kept aboard the ISS to await the next rotation via an American SpaceX Dragon instead of using the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.  This took place during the Biden era and was followed by accusations that the NASA astronauts were stranded for “political reasons”.  But the political reasons may have been politically correct, due to Russia’s involvement in a war, and recalling that they were banned from the 2024 Paris Olympics.

The two NASA  astronauts proceeded to take on routine ISS duties, even pushing a few endurance limits, and somehow endured the ordeal while they claimed, “we were trained for this”.  The two administrations, Biden and Trump, seemed to hold together the whole time, as well as most of the world.  The Crew-9 splashdown represented neither disappointment nor dismay, but neither did it resemble anything too celebrative or over-exuberant regarding a survival story.  The ending tended to stay on the real side.  The recovery team knew that they had to correctly recognize the visitors as a pod of dolphins - not a pool of sharks - such that the episode of Mission Crew-9 was considered real all the way to the end.

 

NASA’s Crew-9 splashdown is greeted by a pod of dolphins located in the
Gulf near Tallahassee, Florida.  {Photo: NASA}

 

 

1.  A complete test of a crewed spacecraft to the ISS will include a 6-month exposure to the radiation of Space.  See The Weather in Space.