“On May 27, @NASA will once again launch American astronauts on American rockets from American soil!” said NASA chief Jim Bridenstine in a recent tweet. Making this the first manned spaceflight from the US in nearly a decade.
Since 2011, the United States has relied on Russian Soyuz Rockets to send Astronauts to Space.
Jim also said in his tweet that Astronaut Robert Behnken and Astronaut Douglas Hurley will be the crew in the upcoming launch.
The launching vehicle used will a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and the spacecraft will be a SpaceX Dragon reusable spacecraft.
The team will lift off at 4:32 pm or 2032 GMT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The team will reach the International Space Station (ISS), approximately after 24 hrs the liftoff. The ISS is currently occupied by one American Astronaut and two Russian Cosmonauts.
NASA, after the failure of two shuttles in the past abandoned the shuttles and turned to the private industry for making a next-generation spacecraft, where SpaceX produced the Crew Dragon and Boeing produced the Starliner but the latter was not considered as the Starliner faced some issues back in December.
Should this launch be successful, SpaceX will become the first private company to send people to space, a large first step towards their goal of making spaceflight commercially viable. The chances of failure seem pretty slim, as the Crew Dragon capsule had already made a round trip from the ISS in march with a mannequin on board, and many more trips to the ISS for refueling purposes have already been made.
