The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
Crew capsule, test dummy rocket toward space station
CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. >> America’s newest capsule for astronauts rocketed Saturday toward the International Space Station on a highstakes test flight by SpaceX.
The only passenger was a life-size test dummy, named Ripley after the lead character in the “Alien” movies. SpaceX needs to nail the debut of its crew Dragon capsule before putting people on board later this year.
This latest, flashiest Dragon is on a fast track to reach the space station Sunday morning, just 27 hours after liftoff.
It will spend five days docked to the orbiting outpost, before making a retrostyle splashdown in the Atlantic next Friday — all vital training for the next space demo, possibly this summer, when two astronauts strap in.
SpaceX founder and chief executive Elon Musk said the launch was “super stressful” to watch, but he’s hopeful the capsule will be ready to carry people later this year.
“To be frank, I’m a little emotionally exhausted,” Musk told reporters barely an hour after liftoff. “We have to dock to the station. We have to come back, but so far it’s worked ... we’ve passed the riskiest items.”
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine called it “a big night for the United States of America.”
“We’re on the precipice of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil again for the first time since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011,” said Bridenstine, who got a special tour of the launch pad on the eve of launch, by Musk.
An estimated 5,000 NASA and contractor employees, tourists and journalists gathered in the wee hours at Kennedy Space Center with the SpaceX launch team, as the
Falcon 9 rocket blasted off before dawn from the same spot where Apollo moon rockets and space shuttles once soared. Across the country at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, company employees went wild, cheering every step of the way until the capsule successfully reached orbit.