USA TODAY International Edition
‘Without question,’ astronauts to fly in ’19
WASHINGTON – NASA Administrator James Bridenstine is all but guaranteeing his agency will soon be back in the business of carrying humans into low-Earth orbit in 2019.
“Without question, by the middle of next year, we’ll be flying American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” he told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview at NASA headquarters. “We’re so close.”
The pronouncement indicates the confidence the agency has in the two aerospace companies – SpaceX and Boeing – contracted under its Commercial Crew program to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station.
The last space shuttle – Atlantis – carried a crew to the orbiting lab in 2011. Since then, NASA has been hitching rides on Russia’s Soyuz rockets. The cost to taxpayers is $82 million a seat.
Washington’s reliance on Moscow for rides to the space station the past several years has been a source of frustration among lawmakers and many of those involved in the U.S. space program.
Though the shuttle replacement program began under President Barack Obama, the resumption of crewed missions from U.S. launch pads would present a symbolic victory to President Donald Trump, who has touted a renewed space program.
The latest schedules show SpaceX appearing slightly ahead in the competition to reach the space station, with plans to fly two astronauts – NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley – in a Crew Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center in April 2019.
Boeing aims to launch a CST-100 Starliner capsule on an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in mid-2019, carrying a three-person crew: NASA’s Eric Boe and Nicole Mann, and Boeing’s Chris Ferguson.
That flight test would go to the station and could last two weeks to six months, depending on NASA’s needs, said Boeing spokeswoman Rebecca Regan. The tests flights would be preceded by unmanned orbital shakedown cruises.