SpaceX leases Cape Canaveral location for capsules to take crews to space station
CLOSE MELBOURNE, Fla. - In a sign that astronaut launches from Florida are growing nearer, SpaceX recently leased an Air Force facility where it will prepare Dragon capsules to fly crews to the International Space Station.
From article, (In a sign that astronaut launches from Florida are growing nearer, SpaceX recently leased an Air Force facility where it will prepare Dragon capsules to fly crews to the International Space Station.
The 45th Space Wing said work on the capsule called Crew Dragon or Dragon 2 would take place in Area 59, a former satellite processing facility on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
“This summer, they should be receiving their first Dragon 2 capsule, which will directly support NASA and the return of astronauts (launching into orbit) from U.S. soil,” said Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, the Wing commander, at a recent transportation summit in Port Canaveral.
It’s unclear when SpaceX or Boeing will be ready to launch test flights of astronauts under NASA contracts.
The most recent public schedules show unmanned test flights of SpaceX’s Dragon in April and Boeing’s Starliner in August. Test flights with two-person crews would follow in August and November, respectively.
Those dates, however, are considered optimistic and likely to slip, maybe even to 2019.
Until then, NASA will continue to rely exclusively on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the space station, as it has since the space agency retired the shuttle program in July 2011.)
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