[NEWS] NASA and SpaceX open a new space age by launching the Crew Dragon private spacecraft with astronauts

[YaKuZa--BoSs]

Two NASA astronauts are traveling for the first time in a ship built by a private company. SpaceX yesterday suffered the explosion of Starship, another of its vehicles, during a test in Texas

 

 

 

Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken are already in space. The two NASA astronauts took off this Saturday, on time, at 3:22 p.m. local time (9:22 p.m. in Spain), starring in the first manned space trip in History aboard a ship that is not owned by a State, but by a company privately, SpaceX, the company created by South African-American billionaire Elon Musk.

It is the first time since the space shuttle Atlantis returned on July 11, 2011 that the United States managed to send a crew into space on a rocket made in that country. In these almost nine years, he has had to use Russian rockets launched from the Baikonur (Kazakhstan) cosmodrome to send his crews to the International Space Station (ISS).

 

The launch of the Crew Dragon has been achieved in the second attempt, since last Wednesday the bad weather forced to postpone the takeoff just a quarter of an hour before the scheduled time, when the two crew were already ready to begin their journey.

This morning, the probability that time would allow the launch was only 50%. Just an hour before takeoff, it rose to 70%, and at 9:22 pm, the spacecraft took off from the mythical 39A platform of Florida's Kennedy Space Center.

Accompanied by their wives, the President, Donald Trump, and the Vice President, Mike Pence, have not wanted to miss the start of this important mission that will allow the United States to stop depending on the Russian Soyuz ships to send their astronauts into space, for a fee. $ 86 million per ticket. "I am very proud of NASA," said Trump.

All four were among the very few invited to launch due to the coronavirus crisis. The staff that has approached these two NASA astronauts these days to prevent them from contracting Covid-19 has also been reduced to the maximum.

PRIVATE BUSINESSES
To regain its own ship, Washington has had the support of the eccentric Musk, since both the Falcon 9 rocket and the Crew Dragon capsule, in which Hurley and Behnken travel, have been manufactured by Space X.

One of the axes of space exploration of the future will be the greater involvement of private companies, which are expected to develop and operate their own rockets and ships that will lower costs and allow more people and institutions to travel to space. Both the SpaceX Crew Dragon and the Starliner spacecraft that Boeing is developing - and that will also transfer NASA astronauts to the ISS - are being closely supervised by NASA engineers.

 

With this flight, the United States also removes a thorn in its national prestige, which had suffered a blow after the withdrawal of the expensive shuttle program, an attempt to create a kind of 'space plane' that not only did not fulfill all the expectations, but ended with two of its ships destroyed - the Challenger, in 1986, and the Columbia, in 2003 - in two accidents that caused the death of all the members of its crews.

Now Washington's goal is not to make Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon make Russian rockets unnecessary, but to combine the use of those systems with those of SpaceX, and also allow Moscow to use squares in its new ships. In addition to SpaceX, in the future they will become part of the rocket and capsule crew launch kits manufactured by Boeing, a company that was devastated by its 737-MAX airliner and, now, the crisis of the Air travel due to the coronavirus has put it on the brink of bankruptcy and in need of a rescue from the State.

That is not the case with SpaceX. Since its inception in 2002, the company has been at the forefront of the nascent private space exploration sector, managing to send spacecraft at space at a lower cost than NASA. Its declared objective is to initiate tourist flights to space in less than two years, a plan for which the launch today from Cape Canaveral is an essential step.

In fact, the launch has been a major advertising hit for Musk, exemplified by, for example, the fact that Hurley and Behnken arrived on the rocket at Teslas, electric cars manufactured by the company of the same name, also founded and directed by Musk, whose fortune is estimated by the Bloomberg news agency at $ 41 billion (€ 36.9 billion).

The main objective of this trip is none other than to check the reliability of the Falcon 9 and the Crew Dragon, so that both are authorized to carry out more missions for NASA and, in the near future, operate completely privately for SpaceX.

EXPLOSION OF A SPACEX PROTOTYPE
The high anticipation for the launch of the Crew Dragon today was partially overshadowed in the last few hours by the explosion of another SpaceX vehicle, Starship SN4.

The prototype of this reusable vehicle that Elon Musk intends to use for his ambitious private exploration program - with planned trips to the Moon and even Mars - has been totally destroyed after a spectacular explosion that has caused a large fireball during a test of their Raptor engines in Boca Chica Texas, with no injuries reported.

SpaceX has not yet reported the cause of this accident during a static test in which only the engines were started.