No astronauts will be on board for the Saturday launch, but the capsule could carry crew to the space station later in the year.
The space shuttle Atlantis rolled to a stop on a runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on July 21,2011, its last flight. That ended an era of American spacecraft carrying astronauts to space.
“Mission complete, Houston,” said Christopher J. Ferguson, the mission commander. “After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle has earned its place in history, and it’s come to a final stop.”
Nearly eight years later, a replacement for the space shuttles is finally on the launchpad, not far from where Atlantis landed. During that time, NASA astronauts have flown to the International Space Station aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
Reflecting a new reliance on the private sector, NASA hired two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to design and build transportation for its astronauts.
[Here’s how to follow the SpaceX Crew Dragon launch.]
After years of delays, the first of those systems — SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule — is scheduled for liftoff on Saturday at 2:49 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on top of one of the company’s Falcon 9 rockets. Forecasts call for an 80 percent chance of favorable weather.
“This is an invaluable exercise for us to learn in the space environment how these systems will be working,” said Kathryn Lueders, the manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew program, during a news conference on Thursday.
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The capsule is not yet ready for astronauts, but the flight is intended as an end-to-end test, doing everything that one with astronauts would do, including docking with the International Space Station early Sunday morning. Then on March 8, it is to leave the space station, and parachute into the Atlantic Ocean a few hours later.
During a previous news conference last week, William H. Gerstenmaier, the NASA official who oversees the human spaceflight program, said problems were to be expected.
“I guarantee everything will not work exactly right, and that’s cool,” Mr.
