Joining Crew-9
Nothing is certain, but NASA indicated on Wednesday for the first time that it is considering flying the Boeing Starliner spacecraft home empty.

But that wouldn’t leave Wiilliams and Wilmore in space indefinitely. They would be assigned a ride home on SpaceX’s Crew-9 mission.

Crew-9 — a routine trip to the space station to replenish expedition staff — is currently slated to fly with four astronauts: NASA astronauts Zena Cardman, Nick Hague and Stephanie Wilson, and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Under NASA’s contingency plan for Starliner, two of those astronauts would be booted off that mission, though officials did not reveal which of the four crew members that might be.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft would then fly with two empty seats to the International Space Station — taking off no earlier than September 24, based on the most recent dates shared by NASA.Ballast, or hunks of metal that serve as dead weight, would fly alongside the two empty seats on Crew-9 to maintain the Crew Dragon’s center of gravity.

The two Crew-9 astronauts would then join Williams and Wilmore aboard the space station, and all four would round out the cast of Expedition 72, which will include additional Russian cosmonauts and is slated to begin in September after a handover period.

As is typical for missions to the space station that join an expedition, the Crew-9 astronauts will stay on board for roughly five or six months — leaving Williams and Wilmore in space for another half year in addition to the two months they’ve already spent in space.

Once part of Crew-9, they’ll fall into a structured routine, kra5.at with their days mapped out hour by hour.