SpaceX Launch
Emailed on May 29th 2020 in The Friday Forward
On Wednesday SpaceX was set to make history as the first private company to launch humans into space. Unfortunately the launch was scrubbed due to weather conditions, but good news - it was rescheduled to this Saturday at 3:22pm ET.
"Saturday and Sunday could turn out to have very similar weather as Wednesday did," CNN meteorologist Haley Brink said, referring to this week's scrubbed launch. "We may be waiting on a game-time decision again this weekend."
Either way, the launch will happen eventually, and it is a very, very cool moment.
The rocket company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has worked for nearly a decade with NASA to design, build, and fly a new seven-seat spaceship called Crew Dragon. NASA's hope with its more than $3.1 billion effort is to once again launch astronauts from US soil — an ability the agency lost in July 2011 when it retired its last space shuttle.
NASA picked the seasoned astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to pilot the mission, called Demo-2.
But as NASA, SpaceX, and the astronauts themselves have made abundantly clear, Demo-2 is not only an experimental crewed test flight but the first of a brand-new spaceship in nearly 40 years.
I think we're really comfortable with it: SpaceX's crew-risk (chance of losing crew members) number is 1 in 276 and its mission-risk (chance of failing mission) number is 1 in 60, NASA told Business Insider in an email on Saturday.
For their part, Behnken and Hurley have accepted the risk calculated by NASA and SpaceX.
"I think we're really comfortable with it," Behnken told Business Insider just after the safety review for Demo-2 finished.
Reflecting on 2020 so far: It would be good for all of us to get a win here.