Countdown as SpaceX, NASA prepare to test new astronaut capsule

Eight years after the last manned US space flight, NASA and SpaceX are preparing to test a new space capsule for astronauts on Saturday -- although for now the only occupant will be a dummy named Ripley.

The new capsule will blast off on board a rocket built by SpaceX -- the space company of billionaire Elon Musk -- at 0249 (0749 GMT) on Saturday from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Its destination is the International Space Station, which it is scheduled to reach by Sunday, with a return to Earth next Friday.

If the flight goes smoothly, NASA plans to put two astronauts on board SpaceX's Crew Dragon capsule by the end of the year.

The excitement was palpable Friday at Cape Canaveral, where a day earlier the rocket was wheeled out of its hangar and staged in a vertical position on the legendary launch pad where the Apollo Moon missions took off.

"It's been a long eight years," said Bob Cabana, the Kennedy Space Center's director and a former astronaut.

"It's exciting to see a crewed vehicle, the SpaceX Dragon, up there on a Falcon 9 on pad 39A," said Cabana, who witnessed the last space shuttle flight return to Cape Canaveral on July 21, 2011.

After the shuttle programme was shuttered in 2011 after a 30-year run, NASA began outsourcing the logistics of its space missions.

It pays Russia to get its people up to the orbiting research facility at a cost of USD 82 million a head, for a round trip.

In 2014, the US space agency awarded contracts to SpaceX and Boeing for them to take over this task.

But the programme has suffered delays as safety requirements are much more stringent for manned flights than for unmanned missions to deploy satellites.

The sky over the launch site was clear Friday, with meteorologists saying there was an 80 per cent chance of conditions being favourable overnight.

"When you are here, right, there is a pride in the country. It's different," said Mark Geyer, director of the Johnson Space Center, where US astronauts are based. "There is a pride in what the United States and its teams can accomplish."
"We instrumented the crap out of that vehicle," said Kathy Lueders, the manager of NASA's Commercial Crew programme. "We are going to learn a ton from this mission."