HOUSTON, Texas—For the first time since September 2010, NASA has named a new, All-American crew that will launch into space from the United States. In fact, the organization announced four of them on Friday, selecting the first two crews that will fly aboard SpaceX’s Dragon and Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft on their test and operational flights.
NASA celebrated the announcement with all the pomp and circumstance one would expect from an agency that has chafed under a spaceflight gap during which America has relied on Russia for human access to space. As they were announced Friday, each of the nine crew members exulted as he or she walked across the stage. Some raised their arms in triumph. Others pumped their fists. It was a cathartic day in Houston, Texas as a crowd of onlookers in a large auditorium cheered.
“What an exciting and amazing day,” NASA’s administrator, Jim Bridenstine, said to open the event. “I want to be really clear about the health of America’s space program. The health of NASA and our space exploration program is as strong as it’s ever been, and it’s getting stronger every day.”
If this was a modest overstatement that overlooked the Apollo program heydey, perhaps it is excusable on what really was a fine day for NASA and America’s space program. Although grounding the shuttle in 2011 has been a painful experience for this Space City and other spaceflight hotspots around the country, at the end of this process America will emerge with not one but two ways to fly its people into space. Moreover, these are modern rockets and spacecraft, unlike the Russian Soyuz vehicle now used (1960s technology) and the space shuttle (1970s).
In the background of the event, a giant American flag hung as a backdrop, making the symbolism of the moment impossible to miss. Bridenstine as well as other officials reiterated this point over and over again, saying that, “For the first time since 2011, we are on the brink of launching American astronauts on American rockets from American soil.”
NASA steps into the future
Yet perhaps more significant is that, with the commercial crew program, NASA has embraced the future. By investing in SpaceX and Boeing, NASA has undeniably stimulated the development of the commercial space industry. With SpaceX, for example, it has allowed a vibrant company to continue innovating and pushing forward at a breathtaking pace.
“You’ve seen what they’ve done since the space shuttle retired seven years ago,” Doug Hurley, who along with Bob Behnken was named to the first crewed flight of the Dragon spacecraft, said of SpaceX. “It’s impressive to land first stages, and fly multiple missions per month. They iterate and innovate quite a bit, and sometimes you’re running just to keep up with them. Other times they use NASA as a resource. What excites me about these guys is that when they decide to do something, it happens at a quick pace.”
And with Boeing, NASA’s new fixed-price contracts for human spaceflight have stimulated a legacy aerospace company to become leaner and more cutting edge. The company has embraced this, providing the first “private” astronaut to fly on one of these vehicles. Former space shuttle commander Chris Ferguson will join shuttle pilot Eric Boe and first-time flyer Nicole Mann for the maiden launch of Starliner.
Having Ferguson flying alongside the other space agency astronauts makes a statement, NASA’s commercial crew program manager Kathy Lueders told Ars in an interview. As part of the commercial crew program and the International Space Station, NASA has sought to plant the seeds for a vibrant economy in low-Earth orbit.
“We’re really hoping this is a capability that the public ultimately can use,” she said. “Because that’s really the goal of commercial crew. Yes it’s a capability that we can use. But we wanted to make sure others can buy a seat, too. The thing that’s kind of cool about this is that we’re really opening up our whole vision of what space, and how we work together in space, can become.”
A long way back
Two of the five astronauts assigned to the test flight crews of Dragon and Starliner have experienced the seven-going-on-eight year spaceflight gap acutely. On July 21, 2011, Ferguson commanded the final flight of the space shuttle, and Hurley sat beside him in the pilot’s seat as they landed the vehicle in Florida. It has been a long road to get back to this point.
Ferguson retired from NASA after that shuttle mission and took a job at Boeing. Still at NASA, Hurley got into the routine of post-shuttle life, in which the agency relied on Russia. Hurley watched as his wife, Karen Nyberg, spent months learning the Russian language and traveling to Russia and Kazakhstan away from their young son to prepare for a six-month stint on the International Space Station. (She flew a successful mission in 2013.)
For NASA, these were painful days. Agency officials and astronauts, in public talks and interviews, would have to explain over and over again that no, the space agency was not shutting down. Thousands of jobs were shed in Florida, at Kennedy Space Center, and in Texas, at Johnson Space Center. Hundreds of flight controllers and dozens of astronauts left the agency.
All the while, NASA got used to the new normal of working more closely with commercial partners, becoming a customer rather than the primary developer of the next generation of rockets and spacecraft to get to the station. It has not been easy. At times, some in Congress sought to end funding for commercial crew when the Obama White House prioritized it. SpaceX and Boeing had setbacks. But on Friday, the light appeared at the end of the tunnel, and it was as bright as undeniable.
If all goes well, SpaceX will launch an uncrewed flight test in November, and Boeing will follow with its own test flight a month or two later. Then, six to nine months after these flights, the first crew will board one of these spacecraft and launch into orbit, bound for the space station. SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell captured the zeitgeist of Friday’s event in a short comment: “It’s right upon us,” she said. “It’s real.”
Finally, it did feel real. And for the first time in a long time, an intangible energy buzzed across the Houston space center. Instead of silently marking time, a reminder of better days gone by, the hundreds of seats inside Teague Auditorium were filled with smiling onlookers. Dozens of film cameras followed the ceremony.
America doesn’t quite have its spaceflight mojo back yet, but it is coming. The nation has crews training on spacecraft—real spacecraft—ready to launch on real rockets. Soon, astronauts from other countries will come to these shores to launch into space.
“The energy in that room today was just incredible,” Nicole Mann, one of the Boeing astronauts, told Ars. “It was amazing. And so, as you mentioned, I’ve never felt that type of energy before and I’m just happy to see that, and see the folks at Johnson Space Center, and really the folks around the whole country, engaged and get behind our space program.”
