NASA gives green light for SpaceX's first human spaceflight

Will SpaceX win the space race for private companies? NASA announced on Friday May 22nd that it had given the green light on Wednesday May 27th to send two American astronauts into space aboard a SpaceX rocket. It will be the first manned flight since 2011 from American soil to the International Space Station (ISS).

"The NASA SpaceX Crew Dragon mission has the green light for the launch," tweeted NASA.

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

Senior officials from the United States 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 safe for the mission.

Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will take off on May 27 at 4:33 p.m. (8:33 p.m. GMT) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule, heading for the ISS, where they will moor the next day.

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.

NASA has funded since the presidency of Barack Obama 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 have walked on the Moon, already judged in 2010 "humiliating and unacceptable". In the end, the hole 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 the Crew Dragon capsule, during ultramodern Apollo capsules of the 1960s. Inside, everything is controlled by touch screens. Like Apollo, Crew Dragon will return to land on Earth.

The SpaceX and Boeing companies will each have to make six trips by four astronauts to the ISS in the coming years, not counting the demonstration mission.

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.

With AFP

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