On Wednesday, the highly anticipated launch of the first manned crew of SpaceX, a flight that would have marked the return, for the first time in nearly a decade, of the human spaceflight from the U.S. Soil was canceled due to cloudy conditions.
Astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were expected to depart the Florida Kennedy Space Center on SpaceX’s Crew Dragon Capsule at 4:33 p.m. ET, however, cloudy conditions forced the launch operators to stand down, less than 20 minutes into the countdown.
Since the Tropical Storm Bertha, which had formed early Wednesday off the South Carolina coast, the 45th Space Wing of the Air Force, which oversees space launch operations from the East Coast, were closely monitoring weather reports at the launch site.
On Saturday, NASA and SpaceX will reattempt the test flight at 3:22 p.m. ET.
This will mark the first time since NASA retired the space shuttle fleet in 2011, that human passengers are launched into orbit from the U.S.
NASA Administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said on Tuesday in a news briefing:
“Our country has been through a lot, but this is a unique moment when all of America can take a moment and look at our country do something stunning again, and that is to launch American astronauts on an American rocket from American soil to the space station.”
On Saturday, if the Crew Dragon capsule launch goes successful, Behnken and Hurley will spend approximately 19 hours circling the Earth until their capsule makes it’s way to the Space Station, marking the first time NASA astronauts have traveled aboard a privately built spaceship into the Space Station.
The test flight is SpaceX’s last big accomplishment under NASA’s Commercial Crew Plan, designed to promote collaborations between the agency and private companies to build new spacecraft for regular space station trips.
NASA has been forced to buy trips to the space station on Russian capsules and rockets after NASA shut down the space shuttle fleet, and if the launch of the SpaceX capsule is successful, American astronauts may shortly have a new path to and from the ISS.
SpaceX has been designing and evaluating their Crew Dragon capsule over the last six years. The company has been using an uncrewed variant of the spaceship for years to transport materials to the space station, but this would be SpaceX’s first manned space flight.
NASA has supported SpaceX with more than $3 billion to build the capsule under the Commercial Crew Program.
The Panthera Post 