Washington (AFP)

Everything is ready in Florida for the launch of the Boeing astronaut capsule, Starliner, which will take a mannequin, Rosie, to the International Space Station on Friday, a crucial test mission for the resumption in 2020 of NASA manned flights.

"If the weather is good, the mission will take place Friday morning," said Kathy Lueders, NASA commercial flight manager, Tuesday at a press conference at the Kennedy Space Center.

"The spacecraft is ready," added John Mulholland, program manager at Boeing.

Boeing and SpaceX have been paid since 2014 by NASA to develop taxis for astronauts to provide round trips between the United States and the station (ISS), a function that only the Russian Soyuz rockets have fulfilled since the end of the shuttles. American in 2011.

The program is two years behind schedule and NASA hopes to start sending astronauts in the first half of 2020, provided the final tests are completed without incident.

The mission, which begins Friday, will last eight days and will serve as a dress rehearsal.

CST-100 Starliner, of its official name, will be launched Friday from Cape Canaveral at 06:36 (11:36 GMT) by an Atlas V rocket built by United Launch Alliance. It will reach the station 25 hours later.

Starliner will remain moored for seven days before detaching. It will land after a rapid four-hour descent into the New Mexico desert on December 28 at 3:47 a.m. (10:47 a.m. GMT).

The SpaceX capsule, dubbed Crew Dragon, successfully completed the same mission last March. The difference is that Dragon returns to land in the ocean, instead of the mainland for Starliner. In both cases, the fall is slowed down by parachutes.

Contrary to past eras, NASA will pay the companies for the service, instead of owning the capsules, a revolution decided under the presidency of Barack Obama and which was to save the space agency money.

But in total, NASA has committed more than $ 8 billion in the two companies to ensure six trips each of four astronauts until 2024. The price of the round trip on Starliner will return to 90 million per astronaut, according to a report published in November by the Inspector General of NASA, against 55 million at SpaceX and more than 80 million currently paid to Russia.

Since neither Dragon nor Starliner are guaranteed to be ready in 2020, NASA is negotiating with Russia to buy a seat on board a Soyuz for fall 2020, said Joel Montalbano of NASA. The last place bought for an American in a Russian rocket is for April 2020.

© 2019 AFP