It should be the first American human flight since 2011. NASA announced on Friday that it had given the green light to the launch next Wednesday of two American astronauts aboard a SpaceX rocket. "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.
We are go for launch! The Flight Readiness Review has concluded and @ NASA's SpaceX Crew Dragon mission is cleared to proceed toward liftoff. pic.twitter.com/G1XdJVAxmv
- Jim Bridenstine (@JimBridenstine) May 22, 2020Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will take off on Wednesday, May 27, at 10:33 p.m. French time aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, heading for the International Space Station (ISS), where they will dock the next day.
Screening
The two men have been in strict quarantine since May 13, but their solitary confinement began in mid-March. "No other space crew has been in quarantine longer than we have in history," said Douglas Hurley during a virtual press conference at the space center. They have been tested twice for coronavirus. "It is rumored that we will still be tested before takeoff," he added.
When NASA asked crowds not to come to the launch in Florida, Jim Bridenstine, boss of the space agency, believes that it is "also the time to do incredible things as a nation, and to inspire the whole world. " It will be the first 100% American manned mission since the end of the space shuttles in 2011 after 30 years of service.
Since then, only the Russians had had a means of space transportation and dozens of American astronauts (and other countries) learned Russian and traveled aboard Soyuz rockets, departing from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, to return to the station, permanently occupied since 2000 by Americans and Russians.
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Since the presidency of Barack Obama, NASA has funded 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 walk on the Moon, already deemed in 2010 "humiliating and unacceptable". In the end, the hole will have 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 pendant of Apollo capsules from the 1960s. Inside, everything is controlled by touch screens. Like Apollo, Crew Dragon will return to land on Earth.
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.