NASA and SpaceX set to make history, again

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• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Nasa and SpaceX are set to make history again when they launch their first operational commercial voyage to the International Space Station. The initial launch was scheduled for yesterday evening but delayed due to weather. The next window for the launch, with four astronauts aboard, is scheduled for 7:27 Eastern time tonight.

  I recently spoke with Dave Mosher, Senior Space Correspondent for Business Insider about the anticipated flight. Dave, we were supposed to have a launch and it was delayed, any important reason why?

• Dave Mosher:

  So SpaceX likes to recover the rocket boosters for this Falcon 9 rocket, this 230-foot tall sort of giant rocket that's going to launch these astronauts into space. This saves them many millions of dollars every launch. We're not quite certain how much. And they didn't have all the equipment they needed in place to recover that booster, in particular, a drone ship which will go out into the Atlantic Ocean and be there to sort of catch the rocket when it lands.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  While space travel seems commonplace because we've been doing it for decades, this is still a giant experiment.

• Dave Mosher:

  There's nothing routine about this mission. It is very much an experiment, just as spaceflight has always been since the very beginning because we haven't hit that cadence, that that repetition of flight and anything can still go wrong. We're still really trying to understand these vehicles, and therefore they're dangerous and they have a certain amount of risk to the people who are flying them.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  And this one we're talking about, I mean, humans have only been on it once before successfully.

• Dave Mosher:

  That's correct, so Demo-2, which launched back in May, this is a demonstration mission by SpaceX for NASA to show that, yeah, we can get people to and from space safely. And therefore, that's, that's going to give us all the data we need to get through this very lengthy certification process that they've been working on for the better part of a decade.

  This constitutes the second crewed flight of the Crew Dragon spaceship and the Falcon rocket and all of the other things that go into it, the recovery operations, the ground control mission control. This is all very new territory for SpaceX. They're still learning how to do it. They've shown they can do it very well, of course, on Demo-2 but, you know, anything can happen.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  What's this mean? Now, if this one, let's say it goes well, does that mean that this is our system, that we're going to send people up periodically this way?

• Dave Mosher:

  This is kind of the very beginning of what could be a very fantastic era in the human race, for the human race. We are talking about the first certified commercial spaceship. This means anybody can go on it and that includes Tom Cruise or maybe a TV contestant through Space Hero. You know, there's all these passengers who are sort of chomping at the bit to get on the space vehicle.

  So we are talking about if this mission succeeds, we are going to have another demonstration that this vehicle is apparently safe to fly and we're going to see more passengers go up more frequently. And it's also the beginning of an era for SpaceX. They're going to be in space continuously with humans from this point forward. They're going to at some point, they're going to have two spaceships with people inside in space as they rotate these crews on the International Space Station.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Finally, this is happening in the middle of a pandemic. What are some of the challenges here that they're experiencing now that they had less of last time?

• Dave Mosher:

  I mean, one challenge we just saw was that Elon Musk, the CEO, chief architect and founder of SpaceX, tested positive for COVID-19 just a few days before launch and NASA had to go and backtrace all of his contacts over the past 14 days to make sure that he didn't interact with anyone or the astronauts that would have put them in danger because what you don't want is, you don't want the coronavirus going to the space station and this height, you know, you're in an air-recycled sort of facility. Like, you don't want that to happen.

  And on the ground, we have all of these people who are working to prepare the vehicle, to check the vehicle, to put stuff inside of it, you know, very sensitive cargo. So there's all of this stuff that has to be done during the pandemic. And it just added these several extra layers of challenges so that the fact that we're seeing this happen relatively on time is kind of an amazing thing in of itself. And I think it bodes well for SpaceX and NASA that they're able to do this and apparently pretty safely.

• Hari Sreenivasan:

  Dave Mosher, senior space correspondent for Business Insider. Thanks so much.

• Dave Mosher:

  Thank you for having me.