WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

Stephen Koerner, Director of the Flight Operations Directorate at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, left, and Pat Forrester, NASA’s chief of the astronaut office, right, monitor the countdown of the launch attempt of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company's Crew Dragon spacecraft on NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley onboard, Wednesday, May 27, 2020, in firing room four of the Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission is the first launch with astronauts of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The test flight serves as an end-to-end demonstration of SpaceX’s crew transportation system. Today’s launch of Behnken and Hurley was scrubbed due to weather and is now scheduled for 3:22 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 30, from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. A new era of human spaceflight is set to begin as American astronauts once again launch on an American rocket from American soil to low-Earth orbit for the first time since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.