CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After years of delays, SpaceX and NASA are closing in on the first experimental launch of a commercial spaceship designed to…
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — After years of delays, SpaceX and NASA are closing in on the first experimental launch of a commercial spaceship designed to fly astronauts into orbit.
The demonstration mission, called Demo-1, is scheduled to launch aboard a Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday at 2:49 a.m. ET from Kennedy Space Center here in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
You can watch the rocket lift off live via NASA TV using the player embedded at the end of this post.
The goal of the launch is to show that Crew Dragon, or Dragon V2 — a new spaceship that Elon Musk’s spaceflight company designed for NASA — is safe to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS).
The experimental spaceship will go to the ISS, but it won’t have any people on board this time. Instead, it will ferry a female crash-test dummy named “Ripley” in a spacesuit, along with some cargo, to the $150 billion orbiting laboratory. If this test proves successful, SpaceX may launch its first astronauts as soon as July.
“Demo-1 is a flight test, it absolutely is, although we view it also as a real mission, a very critical mission,” Kirk Shireman, who manages the space station program at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, said during a press briefing. “The ISS still has three people on board, and so this vehicle coming up to the ISS for the first time has to work.
