'Another big leap': SpaceX set to launch first fully-crewed ISS mission

Elon Musk's rocket companySpaceX is set to launch its first fully-crewed bound for the International Space Station on Saturday.

It isthe program's first six-month routine mission since the United States resumed crewed space flight in May after nine years of reliance on Russia.

NASA on Tuesday officially certified as safe the Crew Dragon capsule developed for regular astronaut transportation by SpaceX, the company founded by Elon Musk that carried two astronauts to the ISS in May and back to Earth again in August without major incident.

"I'm extremely proud to say we are returning regular human spaceflight launches to American soil on an American rocket and spacecraft," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said.

The mission, named CREW-1, will deliver four of the seven individuals from Expedition 64 to the ISS: NASA space travelers Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, and Shannon Walker, just as Japanese space explorer Soichi Noguchi. Endeavor 64 is the term for this 64th gathering of individuals to possess and chip away at the ISS long haul.

Take-off is planned for 7:49 pm Saturday (0049 GMT Sunday) from Kennedy Space Center in Florida and they are expected to arrive at the ISS eight hours later, at 0920 GMT Sunday.

The mission marks a culmination for SpaceX, setting it up to be NASA's favored,and so far most reliable, transportation provider as the agency waits on Boeing's Starliner capsule, which has been held up in testing and is not expected to be ready before next year.

SpaceX has been operating space station re-supplying flights with the cargo version of the Dragon since 2012.

"For the next 15 months, we will fly seven crew and cargo Dragon missions for NASA," SpaceX head of crewed flights Benji Reed said during a phone call Tuesday.

"That means that (from December) starting with Crew-1, there will be a continuous presence of SpaceX Dragons in orbit."

The next crewed mission is expected to blast off at the end of March 2021, carrying one European, one Japanese and two American crew members.

Elon Musk's organisation has dispatched two individuals into space to date: NASA space explorers Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken, who rode to the International Space Station May 30 on board a Crew Dragon container mounted on a Falcon 9 rocket. That experimental drill, named DEMO-2, denoted the primary ever business manned dispatch, and the principal dispatch from American soil since the finish of the Space Shuttle program in 2011.

In any case, it was an experimental drill, with only two space explorers on board, enduring only 64 days with the vast majority of that time in zero-gravity spent on the International Space Station (ISS). On Nov. 14, if all works out as expected, four space explorers will take a Crew Dragon to the ISS and stay on the space station for a half year. It will check the start of the period of commonsense business spaceflight.