NASA and SpaceX won’t be launching its next crew to the International Space Station as planned this week because of the threat from what is forecast to become Hurricane Helene.

NASA announced Tuesday that the planned launch that could have occurred Thursday will now be pushed to at least Saturday as the brewing storm aims to head up into the Gulf of Mexico and strike the Florida coast.

The wind field for the storm, though, is expected to be 250 miles wide as it grows into a strong Category 3 major hurricane by Thursday ahead of landfall.

Tropical Storm Helene forms, forecast to hit Florida as major hurricane

“Although Tropical Storm Helene is moving through the Gulf of Mexico and expected to impact the Florida panhandle, the storm system is large enough that high winds and heavy rain are expected in the Cape Canaveral and Merritt Island regions on Florida’s east coast,” reads a post on NASA’s website.

Now SpaceX is aiming for a Falcon 9 topped with the Crew Dragon Freedom to lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 no earlier than 1:17 p.m. Saturday with backups available Sunday-Tuesday.

“The change allows teams to complete a rehearsal of launch day activities Tuesday night with the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket, which rolled to Space Launch Complex-40 earlier in the day,” the post reads. “Following rehearsal activities, the integrated system will move back to the hangar ahead of any potential storm activity.”

SpaceX Crew-9’s duo arrive to Kennedy Space Center ahead of launch

Flying on Crew-9 are just two passengers — NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov. The duo arrived to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday and remain in quarantine until launch staying at the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at KSC.

The reason Crew-9 is only flying with two is so that the two NASA astronauts who flew up to the ISS back in June aboard Boeing’s Starliner — Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams — can get a ride home with Hague and Gorbunov when the Crew-9 mission concludes next February.

NASA opted to send Starliner home from the ISS without its crew because of concerns over thruster failures and helium leaks that occurred during its flight up.

With Starliner still trying to achieve certification for flight to the ISS, SpaceX remains the only U.S.-based launch provider for human spaceflight to the ISS as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.

Crew-9 is the ninth operational mission SpaceX has performed as part of that program since its initial test flight Demo-2 back in 2020.

To date, SpaceX has launched its fleet of four Crew Dragons 14 times with humans on board flying 54 people into orbit, including two repeat flyers.

This is Crew Dragon Freedom’s fourth flight having previously launched on Crew-1 and two missions for private company Axiom Space, but all three having docked with the ISS.

The launch from Canaveral marks the first human spaceflight from SLC-40, though, after SpaceX built out a crew access arm at the site to allow for two options on the Space Coast for SpaceX Crew Dragon missions.