Gray skies loomed over Florida’s Atlantic coast Tuesday, just one day before two astronauts were set to blast off aboard a SpaceX capsule on the most dangerous and prestigious mission NASA has ever entrusted to a private company.
May 26,2020
Gray skies loomed over Florida’s Atlantic coast Tuesday, just one day before two astronauts were set to blast off aboard a SpaceX capsule on the most dangerous and prestigious mission NASA has ever entrusted to a private company.
There was a 60 percent chance for favorable weather for Wednesday’s flight, according to Tuesday’s latest Cape Canaveral forecast.
US astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have been in strict quarantine for two weeks ahead of their trip on the brand-new Crew Dragon capsule, which will be propelled by a Falcon 9 rocket.
Both the capsule and the rocket were manufactured by SpaceX, the start-up founded in 2002 by the then-thirty-something Elon Musk, a brilliant and brash Mars-obsessive who made his fortune with PayPal and also created the famous Tesla electric cars.
The Crew Dragon is to carry the astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS), which orbits the Earth about 250 miles (400 kilometers) above sea-level at about 17,000 miles per hour.
The success of this mission is a point of national pride for the United States, which has depended on Russian rockets to reach space since its last crewed flight in 2011.
Neither the new coronavirus pandemic nor confinement measures to stop its spread were able to derail the launch, and President Donald Trump will become only the third US leader to watch the take-off of a human space flight in person, after Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton.
