By Andrea Hargraves 
NASA reported on Tuesday (24) that the launch of the Crew-9 mission with SpaceX has been postponed to September 28 due to Tropical Storm Helene advancing in Florida (USA).
Astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore, who flew into space aboard Boeing's CST-100 Starliner capsule in June this year, are expected to return to Earth with the SpaceX team. They are scheduled to return in February 2025.
The next mission for SpaceX's Crew Dragon spacecraft will be a routine flight called Crew-9, which will send a NASA astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut to the International Space Station (ISS).
Although Storm Helene is moving across the Gulf of Mexico and could impact northwest Florida, it is large enough to bring strong winds and heavy rain to Cape Canaveral, where the mission is scheduled to launch.
The Crew-9 mission was originally scheduled to launch around August 18, but was delayed by a month so the team could better analyze problems with Boeing's Starliner spacecraft, which is still docked at the station.
Boeing became the second company in the world to send astronauts into orbit, after SpaceX. But without being able to return its crew, it also became the first company to launch humans into orbit and not be able to return them to Earth.
Boeing's flight was marked by problems, such as a helium leak from the service module's propulsion system, which was discovered before liftoff but deemed irrelevant to the mission.
NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbunov are scheduled to launch aboard the Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station, on what will be the ninth crew rotation mission with SpaceX under the US space agency's Commercial Crew program.
The Crew Dragon capsule has already completed 13 successful crewed flights, the most recent being the Polaris Dawn mission, which launched on September 10.