NASA announced Friday that it has given the green light to the launch next Wednesday of two American astronauts aboard a SpaceX rocket. It will be the first American human flight since 2011.
“The NASA SpaceX Crew Dragon mission has the green light for the launch,” Nasa tweeted. Senior officials from the US space agency and Elon Musk’s company had been meeting since Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to verify that everything was ready and secure for the mission.
Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will take off on May 27 at 4:33 p.m. (10:33 p.m. in Switzerland) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, heading for the International Space Station (ISS), where they will moor the next day. It will be the first 100% American manned mission since the space shuttle stopped in 2011 after 30 years of service.
Independent access to space
Since then, only the Russians have had space transportation. Dozens of American astronauts (and other countries) learned Russian and traveled on Soyuz rockets from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan to the station, which has been continuously occupied since 2000 by Americans and Russians.
NASA has financed since the presidency of Barack Obama SpaceX ($ 3.1 billion in contracts) and separately Boeing ($ 4.9 billion) in order to give the United States independent access to space. The program was originally scheduled to take over from the shuttles in 2015.
A delay that Neil Armstrong, the first man to have walked on the Moon, already judged in 2010 “humiliating and unacceptable”. In the end, the hole lasted almost nine years – provided that the SpaceX flight goes well.
Touch screens
Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have been training for five years on the Crew Dragon capsule, an ultra-modern counterpart to the Apollo capsules of the 1960s. Inside, everything is controlled by touch screens. Like Apollo, Crew Dragon will return to land on Earth.
The SpaceX and Boeing companies will each have to travel six times for four astronauts to the ISS in the coming years, not counting the demonstration mission.
If SpaceX, founded in 2002 by then millionaire Elon Musk (he is now a billionaire), succeeded in this mission, called Demo-2 following Demo-1, which went off without incident in March 2019 with a model on board, it would become the first private company in space history to have transported astronauts to the ISS.
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