NASA and space fans were disappointed Wednesday when the first attempt was called off due to weather. They have waited nearly a decade for this milestone, which will usher in the return of human spaceflight to US soil.
With just minutes left on the countdown clock, officials even suggested on Wednesday that the rocket could have taken off if launch time was just 10 or 20 minutes later. The Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex, which did not sell any tickets for Wednesday's launch, officially reopened on Thursday. In 2014, NASA awarded two contracts: $4.2 billion for Boeing to build its Starliner vehicle, and $2.6 billion to SpaceX, which planned to create a crew worthy version of the Dragon spacecraft that was already flying cargo to and from the International Space Station. NASA had already put money toward SpaceX's development of the Dragon spacecraft used for transporting cargo. The space agency has said Boeing received more money because it was designing the Starliner from scratch.
Launch officials and mission controllers will need to gather to support the launch, but they've implemented additional safety measures, such as changing control rooms when a new shift begins so that the other room can be deep cleaned. NASA wants to keep Behnken and Hurley on the space station until another Crew Dragon capsule is ready to send more people on its next mission.
The Crew Dragon capsule is fully autonomous, so the astronauts will mostly need to just monitor the systems and keep in touch with mission control unless something goes awry. Rotating crews of astronauts have staffed the ISS continuously since the year 2000, allowing thousands of scientific experiments to be carried out in microgravity. Research has included everything from how the human body responds to being in space to developing new medications.
Last week, NASA conducted a"launch readiness review," which was meant to ensure that all the stakeholders are comfortable moving forward. Crew Dragon is also equipped with a unique emergency abort system designed to jettison astronauts to safety if something goes wrong.Officials in both countries have held up their symbiotic relationship on the International Space Station as a beacon of post-Cold War cooperation. But tensions have climbed since the early 2010s, and that has occasionally extended into the countries' space partnership.
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