Reportedly the US space agency said after much delays, NASA has given the green light to Elon Musk owned SpaceX's Crew Dragon to launch its first unmanned test flight to the International Space Station (ISS) on March 2. Meanwhile the flight, called Demonstration Mission-1 or DM-1, will be launched at 2.48 a.m. on March 2 from NASA's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida. Furthermore this will be the first time a commercially built and operated American rocket and spacecraft designed for humans will launch to the space station, since the retirement of the space shuttle in 2011.
The space agency said “The test flight will provide valuable data that NASA will review as part of the process to certify SpaceX's crew transportation system is as safe as possible for carrying astronauts to and from the space station”. Furthermore Kathy Lueders, Commercial Crew Program Manager at NASA said the unscrewed flight tests are a great dry run for not only our hardware, but for our team to get ready for our crewed flight tests.
Kathy Lueders added "NASA has been working together with SpaceX and Boeing to make sure we are ready to conduct these test flights and get ready to learn critical information that will further help us to fly our crews safely”. Moreover the US space agency retired its space shuttle program in 2011 and has relied on Russian vehicles since then to go to the ISS and the agreement with Russia to fly crews on Soyuz will end in 2019.
