Wednesday's historic launch from Cape Canaveral would make Elon Musk's SpaceX the first private company to carry people into orbit — and open a new era for America's space program. If it works.
‘The promises of science fiction’to the International Space Station. The astronauts aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule, Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, are veteran spacefarers who have spent a combined 57 days in space and served as test pilots in the Marine Corps and Air Force, respectively.
Another curveball is Musk, who has rankled some government officials by actions such as smoking marijuana on a 2018 video podcast — a big no-no for a government contractor with a security clearance that prompted NASA to conduct an investigation into SpaceX’s safety culture — and daring authorities to arrest him when he reopened Tesla’s plant near San Francisco.
“Those are meaningful words when we say that,” he said. “Our job is to carry Bob and Doug to the space station … and then we need to bring them home safely back to their families.”The Commercial Crew program is also helping finance a competing vehicle — Boeing's Starliner — which failed to reach the space station in December during a flight test without a crew. The capsule, which is still undergoing tests, is expected to redo that test flight this summer.
At its current pace, the development of Commercial Crew has been only slightly faster than that of the space shuttle, the agency’s last successful program to launch humans into space.in early 1970, and the shuttle Columbia launched on its first flight in April 1981. Work on Commercial Crew has been going on for a decade.
The goals of the Commercial Crew program to deliver routine access to space are not new either. The space shuttle was originally expected to fly to space once a week, but that never happened as the missions ended up being much less frequent and more expensive than originally projected. “This is really just the first step,” said Tory Bruno, the CEO of the rocket company United Launch Alliance — a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin — and a member of the National Space Council’s User Advisory Group. “There is a time ... just a couple decades away where ordinary people like you might live and work in space. All of that begins in [low-Earth orbit.]”
“In the beginning, it’ll be very wealthy people going on rides to the space station in these vehicles … but eventually, it will follow The U.S. and Russia will continue to work together on the space station, but that could be privatized as early as 2024. NASA is planning to develop another orbiting habitat around the moon called the Gateway, but it’s unclear if Russia would have the money to sign on to a major project like that.
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