Tropical storm threatens landmark SpaceX-Nasa launch
The countdown clock to the United States’ return to human spaceflight continued to tick down on Wednesday, despite a tropical storm in the Atlantic and thunderstorms at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center threatening the scheduled 4.33pm EST launch of Nasa’s first crewed flight in almost a decade.
Mission managers gave the historic SpaceX Demo-2 test flight of Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon crew capsule no more than a 50-50 chance of launching Wednesday, but chose to proceed with preparations in the hope of a break in the weather before the planned liftoff time.
Veteran astronaut Bob Behnken, and crewmate Doug Hurley, who piloted the final flight of the Nasa space shuttle program in July 2011, donned pressurized spacesuits ahead of the trip to the launchpad in an electric car manufactured by Tesla, another of the SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s companies.
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Since the shuttle Atlantis touched down for the final time in 2011, the US has had no capability to launch astronauts into orbit, purchasing seats instead from the Russian space agency aboard Soyuz spacecraft to ferry crew to the International Space Station.
Wednesday’s scheduled flight – referred to by the Nasa administrator, Jim Bridenstine, as “the big show” – is the first with astronauts from US soil under the space agency’s commercial crew program, an initiative to hand over lower earth orbit spaceflight to private contractors while it concentrates on deeper-space ambitions such as a return to the moon.
“Having the independence and the capability of doing this is an important and major change,” said Dr Henry Hertzfeld, the director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University.
“We don’t have to go abroad and buy the seats to the ISS from other nations any more.”
Donald Trump and the vice-president, Mike Pence, were attending Wednesday’s launch attempt, the president having made space a policy priority through the foundation of Space Force as a branch of the US military independent of Nasa.
In 2018, Trump unveiled his America First National Space Strategy, a year after reconvening the National Space Council after a 24-year hiatus and directing Nasa to land humans on the moon by 2024 for the first time since the final Apollo mission in 1972.
With Tropical Storm Bertha churning over South Carolina, there was a risk of high waves causing safety criteria violations at possible emergency splashdown sites in the Atlantic. If Wednesday’s mission is scrubbed, the next launch opportunity is on Saturday.
