Elon Musk’s Spice X company is preparing to make history by moving astronauts from NASA into space next Wednesday, on the first manned flight from US soil in nine years, although everyone questioned its ability to do so.
US President Donald Trump will be among the spectators at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where he will follow the launch that got the green light despite months of closings due to the Covid 19 pandemic.
The public will be able to watch the launch of the “Dragon Dragon” vehicle with a Falcon 9 missile towards the International Space Station via live broadcast in respect of the measures of social divergence.
The US space agency’s Crow Crow Program, which aims to develop special spacecraft to move American astronauts into space, began under former President Barack Obama.
The last launch
In the 22 years of launching the first components of the International Space Station, the crew was only sent to spacecraft developed by NASA and the Russian Space Agency.
NASA has used its huge and sophisticated winged vehicles that transported dozens of astronauts into space for three decades.
But her high cost of $ 200 billion for 135 trips, in addition to two fatal accidents that ended this program.
The last landing of the “Atlantis” spacecraft was on July 21, 2011, and after that, the American astronauts learned the Russian language and traveled to the International Space Station in the Russian “Soyuz” missile from Kazakhstan in a partnership that succeeded in reducing political tensions between Washington and Moscow, but this arrangement was Temporarily.
So NASA assigned two private companies, Boeing and SpaceX, to design and build spacecraft to replace the shuttles.
Nine years later, Elon Musk’s “SpiceX”, the South African businessman who also founded Paypal and Tesla in 2002, is ready.
success story
At 4:33 p.m. local time (20:33 GMT), the “Falcon 9” missile is scheduled to launch from the A39 launch platform, in the forefront of which is the “Dragon Dragon” vehicle.
The US space agency has awarded SpaceX more than $ 3 billion in contracts since 2011 to build the spacecraft.
The spacecraft will carry astronauts, Robert Pinkin, 49, and Douglas Hurley, 53, after 19 hours. The spacecraft will dock with the International Space Station where three astronauts, two Russians and an American, are waiting.
According to Cape Canaveral forecasts, the weather is still unfavorable with a 60% probability that conditions will be bad, and the next launch window will be Saturday, May 30.
It took five more years to prepare for the launch than planned, but even with these delays, SpaceX overpowered Boeing.
Boeing’s Starliner trial failed due to serious software problems and has to be rebuilt.
A critical task
“It was a true success story,” Scott Hubbard, former director of NASA’s Ames Center in Silicon Valley, who is now teaching at Stanford University, told AFP.
“There was a lot of doubt,” said Hubbard, who met Mask before the creation of “Spice X” where he worked on the Safety Advisory Team. “Officials from major companies such as Lockheed and Boeing told me during a conference that Spice X curators did not know what they were ignorant of.” .
Since 2012, SpaceX has been supplying the International Space Station for NASA thanks to a copy of the Dragon spacecraft.
This manned mission, called “Dimo-2”, is crucial for Washington in two ways. The first is NASA’s reliance on the Russians, and the second is to find a market for flights “in low orbit” that are available to tourists and businessmen.
However, Elon Musk aims to go further. It builds a massive missile that will be called “StarShip” to move around the moon or even to travel to Mars and ultimately make humans “one of the living species that can live on more than one planet.”
–
