Washington (AFP)

SpaceX will send two American astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) on May 27 with its new Crew Dragon capsule, the chief of Nasa announced on Friday. It will be the first human space flight launched from the United States in almost ten years.

"On May 27, NASA will once again launch American astronauts aboard an American rocket from American territory!", Tweeted Jim Bridenstine, administrator of the space agency. Since July 2011, the Americans have depended on the Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the ISS, the only vehicle available in the world.

NASA was targeting the month of May for this mission, and maintained the schedule despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley have been training for years on this demonstration mission, the first with humans on board, and which the United States has eagerly awaited to emancipate itself from dependence on Russia.

They will be installed in the Crew Dragon capsule, an adapted version of the Dragon cargo capsule which has been supplying the ISS with equipment and food since 2012, and which will be attached to the top of SpaceX's rocket rocket, the Falcon 9.

Takeoff is scheduled for May 27 at 4:32 p.m. (8:32 p.m. GMT) from the legendary launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The same step from which the Apollo astronauts left for the Moon.

- Elon Musk first -

They will dock with the ISS after 24 hours. But the duration of their mission has not yet been defined. There is currently an American and two Russians in the station.

The mission will be a historic event for NASA, which has struggled to turn the page on space shuttles. They transported American astronauts for thirty years, but two exploded, and they were put away in July 2011.

NASA had then decided to change the model and entrust the development of the next vehicles to the industry, while maintaining strict supervision, and by largely funding the program.

The new company SpaceX and the giant Boeing were chosen, and paid billions of dollars by NASA. SpaceX developed Crew Dragon, and Boeing the Starliner capsule.

But Boeing partially failed in an unladen mission in December that exposed dangerous software and communications problems, and Starliner will have to redo an unmanned flight.

The company of Elon Musk, who also founded the electric car manufacturer Tesla, could therefore accomplish the feat of becoming the first private company to transport astronauts into space.

Crew Dragon successfully completed a dress rehearsal of this mission with a mannequin on board in March 2019. The capsule had docked at the ISS, more than 400 kilometers from Earth, and had spent six days there before returning to land in the Atlantic, slowed down by parachutes, like the Apollo capsules.

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