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Three Americans – Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker – and Japanese Soichi Noguchi will depart at 7:27 pm Sunday (0027 GMT Monday) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
In May, SpaceX completed a demonstration mission showing it could take astronauts to the ISS and bring them back safely, thus ending nearly a decade of dependence on Russia for travel on its Soyuz rockets.
“The story this time around is that we are launching what we call an operational flight to the International Space Station,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters on Friday.
The launch will be attended by Vice President Mike Pence and second lady Karen Pence.
The crew will dock at their destination around 11pm Monday evening (4am GMT Tuesday), joining two Russians and one American aboard the station, and will stay for six months.
The Crew Dragon earlier this week became the first spacecraft to be certified by NASA by the Space Shuttle nearly 40 years ago.
It is a capsule, similar in shape to the spacecraft that preceded the Space Shuttle, and its launch vehicle is a reusable SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
At the end of his missions, the crew dragon deploys parachutes and then splashes into the water, just like in the Apollo era.
NASA turned to SpaceX and Boeing after closing the checkered Space Shuttle program in 2011, which failed in its primary goals of making space travel convenient and safe.
The agency will have spent more than $ 8 billion on the commercial crew program by 2024, with the hope that the private sector can take care of NASA’s needs in “low earth orbit” so that it is free to focus on missions. back to the Moon and then to Mars.
SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has overtaken its much older rival Boeing, whose program failed after a failed test of its unmanned Starliner last year.
But SpaceX’s success won’t mean the US will stop hitchhiking Russia altogether, Bridenstine said.
“We want to have an exchange of places where American astronauts can fly on Russian Soyuz rockets and Russian cosmonauts can fly on commercial vehicles,” he said, explaining that it was necessary in the event that one of the programs was inactive for a period of time.
The reality, however, is that space ties between the United States and Russia, one of the few bright spots in their bilateral relations, have worn down in recent years and much remains uncertain.
Russia has said it will not be an Artemis partner returning to the moon in 2024, arguing that the NASA-led mission is too US-focused.
Dmitry Rogozin, the head of the Russian space agency has also repeatedly mocked SpaceX’s technology, and this summer announced that Roscosmos would build rockets that surpass Musk’s.
He told a state news agency that he was not impressed by the Crew Dragon’s water landing, calling it “quite agitated” and saying his agency was developing a methane rocket that will be reusable 100 times.
But the fact that a national space agency feels compelled to engage with a company is likely validation of NASA’s public-private strategy.
The emergence of SpaceX has also deprived Roscosmos of a valuable revenue stream.
The cost of round-trip travel on Russian rockets had risen and stood at about $ 85 million per astronaut, according to estimates last year.
– Presidential transition –
Presidential transitions are always a difficult time for NASA, and Joe Biden’s ascension in January should be no different.
The agency has not yet received from Congress the tens of billions of dollars needed to finalize the Artemis program.
Bridenstine has announced that she will step down in order to let the new president set his own goals for space exploration.
So far, Biden hasn’t commented on the 2024 timeline.
Democratic party documents say they support NASA’s aspirations for the Moon and Mars, but also point to the elevation of the agency’s Earth Sciences division to better understand how climate change is affecting our planet.
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