Washington (AFP)

NASA gave the green light on Friday to the launch on May 27 of two astronauts aboard a SpaceX rocket, a crucial step to break American dependence on Russia since 2011 to access the International Space Station (ISS).

Senior officials from the space agency and the company founded by Elon Musk in 2002 had been meeting since Thursday at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to verify that everything was ready and safe for the first flight of the brand-new SpaceX capsule, Crew Dragon, with passengers on board.

"All the systems and subsystems have been evaluated and in the end we approved the green light," said Jim Bridenstine, boss of NASA, during a virtual press conference in the space center, in a room press release due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley have been in strict quarantine since May 13, but their solitary confinement had started in mid-March, they said.

"No other space crew has been in quarantine longer than we have in history," said Doug Hurley. They have been tested twice for the new coronavirus, and "it is rumored that we will still be tested before takeoff," he added.

As for maintaining the mission despite the containment problems, Bob Behnken philosophized: "when you want, you can".

When NASA asked crowds not to come to the Florida launch, Jim Bridenstine said it was "also a time to do incredible things as a nation and to inspire the world".

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket will propel the two men to the sky on May 27 at 4.33 p.m. (8:33 p.m. GMT), in the direction of the space station where they will dock the next day.

It will be the first time that American astronauts have taken off from the United States since the end of the space shuttles in 2011, after thirty years of service.

Since then, only the Russians have had a means of transport to the ISS, and dozens of American astronauts (and other countries) have learned Russian and borrowed the Soyuz rockets, from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, to get to the station, permanently occupied since 2000 by Americans and Russians.

- Private public partnership -

NASA has financed, since the presidency of Barack Obama, SpaceX ($ 3.1 billion in contracts) and 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". Finally, the break will have lasted almost nine years - provided that the SpaceX flight goes well.

Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken have been training for five years on Crew Dragon, an ultra-modern pendant of Apollo capsules from the 1960s. Inside, touch screens have replaced buttons and joysticks. Unlike the shuttles, the capsule has an emergency ejection system in the event of a problem with the rocket taking off. In several months, Crew Dragon will return to land in the ocean, like Apollo, slowed down by four huge parachutes.

Once the capsules have been approved, SpaceX and Boeing will each have to make six trips by four astronauts to the ISS.

If SpaceX succeeds in the mission which will launch next week, called Demo-2 after Demo-1 which took place without incident in March 2019 with a mannequin, it would become the first private company to have transported astronauts to the ISS .

Boeing, which is developing the Starliner capsule, missed its unmanned test mission in December and will have to start it again.

Cooperation with Russia will not suddenly stop: NASA intends to continue to fly some Americans on Soyuz. Non-Americans will travel to Dragon in the future.

SpaceX also wants to send tourists to space: a mission with three private passengers is planned for the second half of 2021. The ticket will undoubtedly be worth tens of millions of dollars.

© 2020 AFP