The National Aeronautics Space Administration (NASA) has finally announced on Wednesday the schedule for the maiden flight of the Crew Dragon capsule riding aboard the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket en route to the International Space Station (ISS) which will be this coming January 7, 2019.
According to Reuters, the liftoff will take place in Kennedy Space Center in Florida. This space project which was borne out of the efforts of Tesla's founder, Elon Musk, would play a very crucial role in the success of the space agency's Commercial Crew Program.
Its primary aim is to launch American astronauts to space from US soil for the first time ever since 2011. NASA's fleet of space shuttles has long been decommissioned for quite some time already. For the agency to send a crew to the ISS, it has to tap on the Russian space program through its Soyuz spacecraft. For each seat, the US government will have to pay close to a hundred million dollars.
With SpaceX's involvement, plus a few private companies joining the fray, the US will have once again the capacity to send its own astronauts aboard its own spacecraft, a previous report from Business Times indicated.
Crew Dragon
Although NASA has yet to unveil the flight path detail of the Crew Dragon, the test should be able to provide a more concrete data on the performance of the Falcon 9 in terms of its orbital, docking, and landing operations.
Should the test be proved to be successful, the report from Space Flight Now said that the project will then be ready to launch its first piloted Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket which will likely to take place sometime in June.
This manned spaceflight will reportedly carry veteran NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the ISS.
Other Players in the Program
Musk's brainchild won't be the only firm involved in this space endeavor. According to this report, airliner giant Boeing also holds a spaceflight contract from NASA which it will seek to fulfill using its proprietary CST-100 Starliner capsule.
After SpaceX, Boeing's Starliner will begin its unmanned test flights in March 2019 to be followed by a crewed flight in August 2019.
On its part, Starliner will be flying atop the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rockets.
The Jan.7 launching window announcement comes at the heel of NASA's statement saying that the agency will conduct an assessment study of the involved companies in terms of their respective adherence to a drug-free environment, among a few common factors.
