NASA sets launch date for SpaceX U.S. manned mission to space station
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[April 20, 2020]
By Joey Roulette
(Reuters) - NASA on Friday set a launch
date of May 27 for its first astronaut mission from U.S. soil in nearly
ten years.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine tweeted that billionaire entrepreneur
Elon Musk's space company, SpaceX, will send two NASA astronauts to the
International Space Station aboard its Falcon 9 rocket from Florida -
marking the company's first mission carrying humans aboard.
"BREAKING: On May 27, @NASA will once again launch American astronauts
on American rockets from American soil!" Bridenstine wrote on Twitter.
The U.S. space agency had previously said the mission, in which NASA
astronauts Bob Behnken, 48, and Doug Hurley, 52 will ride SpaceX's Crew
Dragon capsule to the space station, would launch sometime in May.
As with most high-profile missions, the new date could slip. If all goes
as planned, the mission would mark the first time NASA launches its
astronauts from U.S. soil since the 2011 retirement of the space
shuttle.
The space agency has since relied on Russia's space program to ferry
astronauts to the space station.
A decade in the making, next month's mission is the final test for Crew
Dragon before regularly flying humans for NASA under its Commercial Crew
Program, a public-private initiative. Boeing Co <BA.N> is developing its
competing Starliner astronaut taxi as the agency's second ride to space.
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NASA Commercial Crew Program astronauts Bob Behnken (L) and Doug
Hurley speak at a post-launch news conference after a SpaceX Falcon
9 rocket, carrying the Crew Dragon spacecraft, lifted off on an
uncrewed test flight to the International Space Station from the
Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., March 2,
2019. REUTERS/Mike Blake
The agency is mulling whether to extend Behnken and Hurley's stay
aboard the space station from a week as originally planned to up to
six months in order to ensure U.S. astronauts are staffed on the
station continuously.
Timelines for the crew program have been pushed back by years, with
the first crew launch originally slated for early 2017.
The development delays with Crew Dragon and Boeing's Starliner have
forced NASA to buy more crew seats from Russia's space agency, an
increasingly costly expense as Moscow scales its own Soyuz program
back to just two missions a year.
(Reporting by Joey Roulette; Editing by Greg Mitchell and Bill
Berkrot)
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