It’s be a decade since NASA has sent American astronauts into space…
The last ten year they have have had to hitch rides up on Russian space craft….
This time a private outfit with NASA ex-people named Space X will be sending their Crew Dragon fancy capsule up to the International Space Station onto of the companies Falcon 9 rocket…
Forget the Star Trek NCC-1701 Enterprise space ship series (models 1701 A thru E)..
After the last Space Shuttle tragedy ?
We’ve got back to capsules….
Space ships are a LONG way off….
SpaceX’s epic first crewed launch has been a decade in the making for NASA.
On Wednesday (May 27), a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to rise from Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley toward the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Crew Dragon capsule. The mission, called Demo-2, will be the first orbital crewed flight to launch from U.S. soil since NASA’s space shuttle fleet retired in July 2011.
And Crew Dragon is indeed a successor to the shuttle — one of two successors, in fact, along with Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft. Both capsules have been developed with funding from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, which got up and running in 2010.
SpaceX’s historic Demo-2 astronaut launch: Full coverage
NASA’s plan back then was to have at least one private American crewed spaceship flying by 2015. That timeline would limit the nation’s total dependence on Russian Soyuz spacecraft — the only astronaut taxi left after the shuttles’ grounding — to four years. ..
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For its part, NASA wants Demo-2 to kick off a new era of public-private exploration that allows the United States to accomplish great things in the final frontier. For instance, the space agency is also relying heavily on private industry in its Artemis program of lunar exploration, which aims to land two astronauts near the moon’s south pole in 2024 and establish a sustainable human presence on and around the moon by 2028. (SpaceX is one of three companies that just received funding to develop a lunar landing system for Artemis.)…
image….In this illustration, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon approaches the International Space Station for docking. The capsule has room to carry seven astronauts.
SpaceX/NASA
The lunch window opens at 4 PM DST….
The do expect some weather in the area before the launch….
Launch scrubbed due to bad weather…
They try again on Saturday….
America HAS just launched its first own astronauts into space in almost a decade…..
The SpaceX capsule is now in orbit….
The effort is a NASA/Private cooperation effort….
It IS a GOOD thing to see for America even as things are sideways in the streets of America…
The two man crew is on the way to the International Space Station….
The crew will take 19 hours to get to the ISS….
Once there…
They will be there till sometime in July….
Next SpaceX trip is the end of August….
The SpaceX capsule has docked with Internationa Space Station this morning….