On Wednesday, look to the stars. You just might catch a glimpse of America’s first manned spacecraft in nine years, arcing through the atmosphere toward the International Space Station.
Nearly a decade after NASA retired its three surviving Space Shuttles, the space agency is poised to get back to manned spaceflight in dramatic fashion. NASA has teamed up with California rocket company SpaceX to blast veteran astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley to the International Space Station aboard a high-tech new capsule propelled by a Falcon rocket.
The launch is scheduled for around 4:00 p.m. Eastern Time at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. You can watch it here.
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The sleek, 27-foot-tall Crew Dragon capsule boasts all the latest space technology. A sophisticated artificial-intelligence autopilot. Touch-screen controls. Even a new type of zero-gravity toilet.
But in many ways, Crew Dragon is a blast from the past. Where the much-larger, winged Space Shuttle launched atop a rocket but landed like an airplane, the compact Crew Dragon descends to Earth’s surface underneath a parachute. Just like the Apollo capsules that took astronauts to the moon for the first time in July 1969.
For SpaceX-founder Elon Musk, Wednesday's launch is the culmination of nearly two decades of work. Musk started SpaceX in 2002 with the goal of driving down the cost of rocket launches. SpaceX's earliest launches in 2008 and 2009 were failures. But Musk and SpaceX kept at it. By 2010 more of the company's launches were succeeding than failing. NASA pumped some money into the company. The U.S. Air Force hired it to launch satellites and robotic space planes. But a manned spacecraft was one of Musk and SpaceX's ultimate goals.
NASA and SpaceX both hope that the retro-futuristic Crew Dragon will help open a new era of space exploration. Instead of NASA developing, owning and operating its own spacecraft, the agency would encourage private industry to invent and build spaceships. NASA would rent them for trips to low orbit. Behnken and Hurley’s planned daylong ride to the space station set NASA back around $55 million per seat.
NASA claims this privatized model will drive down the cost of space missions and make Earth’s orbit more accessible for government agencies, industry, researchers and even space-tourism operators. “We need the capability to access space not just for NASA, but for all of humanity,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine told reporters.
That’s the long-term ambition. The short-term goal is much more prosaic. “We’re rebuilding capability that had been lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle,” space historian Roger Launius told The Daily Beast.
The Shuttle launched for the first time in 1981. Like Crew Dragon, the Space Shuttle was supposed to help get Americans back into space. After landing astronauts on the Moon in 1969, NASA completed a few more lunar landings.
But the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission in 1970, during which a malfunction nearly stranded three astronauts, caused unease in the space agency. NASA lost confidence in the Apollo tech. The last Moon mission took place in 1972. NASA launched its last Apollo capsule in 1975 for a brief, orbital rendezvous with a Soviet Soyuz capsule.
After that, there were no manned American space missions until the Space Shuttle’s first launch six years later. The destruction of the Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003, together claiming the lives of 14 astronauts, undermined NASA’s confidence in the Shuttle the same way that Apollo 13 cast doubts on the previous generation of space tech.
The post-Shuttle era was different than the previous gap in American manned space missions. After the Shuttles shipped off to museums in 2011, NASA cut a deal with the Russian space agency. The Russian would haul American astronauts to the International Space Station aboard old-fashioned—but highly reliable—Soyuz capsules for a cost of up to $90 million per ride.
But NASA always planned to return to space aboard American spaceships. The administration of George W. Bush launched the Constellation program to develop new capsules and rockets for missions to the space station and beyond. President Barack Obama cancelled parts of that program but preserved the new Orion capsule.
Neither Bush nor Obama anticipated the meteoric rise of the private space industry. Companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic grew from billionaires’ vanity projects into viable businesses in the span of just a few years. “That sort of changed the dynamics of how things are done,” Launius said. “There are more actors.”
Orion remains in development, but now NASA’s optimizing it for long-distance missions to the Moon and Mars. For the shorter trips to the space station, NASA paid SpaceX $3 billion to develop Crew Dragon. The agency also handed aerospace firm Boeing nearly $5 billion to work on its own manned capsule, the Starliner. Boeing’s craft ran into some serious technical obstacles during a 2019 test flight.
Those billions of dollars are starting to pay off for NASA. SpaceX for years has been sending unmanned capsules on resupply missions to the space station. But Behnken and Hurley’s Wednesday trip aboard the Crew Dragon could prove that the same kinds of capsules are safe for human beings.
Everyone is aware of the risks. Apollo had its flaws. So did the Space Shuttle. SpaceX and NASA have been testing Crew Dragon for years.
But tests can only go so far. We won’t know for sure that Crew Dragon works until Behnken and Hurley arrive safely at their destination. “There will be a little sense of relief when they’re in orbit,” SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell told reporters. “I’ll feel more relief when they get to the station.”
