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WASHINGTON: Four astronauts were ready to launch the SpaceX Crew Dragon “Resilience” to the International Space Station on Sunday (November 15), the first of what the United States expects to be many routine missions following a successful test flight to late spring.
Three Americans, Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker, and Japan’s Soichi Noguchi will take off at 7.27pm on Sunday from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
In May, SpaceX completed a demonstration mission showing it could get astronauts to the ISS and bring them back safely, ending nearly a decade of dependence on Russia for travel on its Soyuz rockets.
“The story that is being made this time is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters on Friday.
The launch will be attended by Vice President Mike Pence and Second Lady Karen Pence.
The crew will dock at their destination around 11 p.m. Monday night, join two Russians and an American aboard the station, and stay for six months.
NASA astronauts (left to right) Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency astronaut Soichi Noguchi are pictured in SpaceX space suits at a dress rehearsal prior to the launch of Crew Dragon. (Photo: AFP / Joel KOWSKY)
The Crew Dragon earlier this week became the first NASA-certified spacecraft since the Space Shuttle nearly 40 years ago.
It is a capsule, similar in shape to the spacecraft that preceded the space shuttle, and its launch vehicle is a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
At the end of their missions, Crew Dragon deploys parachutes and then splashes into the water, just like in the Apollo era.
NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after shutting down the checkered space shuttle program in 2011, which failed in its main goals of making space travel affordable and safe.
The agency will have spent more than $ 8 billion on the commercial crew program by 2024, in hopes that the private sector can address NASA’s “low Earth orbit” needs so that it is free to focus on missions. back to the Moon and then to Mars.
SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has outperformed its much older rival Boeing, whose program fell through after a failed test of its unmanned Starliner last year.
But SpaceX’s success won’t mean the United States will stop hitchhiking Russia altogether, Bridenstine said.
“We want to have a seat swap where American astronauts can fly on Russian Soyuz rockets and Russian cosmonauts can fly on commercial crew vehicles,” he said, explaining that it was necessary in case any of the programs were down for a period of time. time frame.
The reality, however, is that space ties between the United States and Russia, one of the few bright spots in their bilateral relations, have faded in recent years and much remains uncertain.
Russia has said it will not be a partner in the Artemis program to return to the Moon in 2024, claiming that the NASA-led mission is too focused on the United States.
Dmitry Rogozin, head of the Russian space agency, has also repeatedly poked fun at SpaceX’s technology, and this summer announced that Roscosmos would build rockets that would outperform Musk’s.
He told a state news agency that he was not impressed with the Crew Dragon’s water landing, calling it “quite difficult” and saying his agency was developing a methane rocket that will be reusable 100 times.
But the fact that a national space agency is motivated to compare itself to a company is possibly a validation of NASA’s public-private strategy.
The emergence of SpaceX has also deprived Roscosmos of a valuable revenue stream.
The cost of round-trip Russian rocket trips had risen to around $ 85 million per astronaut, according to last year’s estimates.
PRESIDENTIAL TRANSITION
Presidential transitions are always a difficult time for NASA, and Joe Biden’s ascension in January is expected to be no different.
The agency has not yet received from Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed to end the Artemis program.
Bridenstine has announced that he will resign to allow the new president to set his own goals for space exploration.
So far, Biden has not commented on the 2024 timeline.
The Democratic party documents say they support NASA’s aspirations for the Moon and Mars, but also emphasize raising the agency’s Earth science division to better understand how climate change is affecting our planet.
