Last Wednesday, the launch was canceled about fifteen minutes in advance. “The weather is the only thing we can’t control,” said NASA. There are no problems with the missile and the launch system, the organization emphasizes. “There was electricity in the air and in such a case the rocket could come down like a lightning bolt.”
Not dark enough
The launch has been moved to tomorrow. Due to the orbit that ISS orbits the Earth, the launch is pushed forward about 23 minutes every day. Therefore, the launch is tomorrow 1 hour and 10 minutes earlier.
The plan is to launch the rocket around 9:22 pm, but it will not be dark enough in the Netherlands. So it will not be seen here. However, if you want to give it a try, it is best to stand on the beach or in the polder with binoculars facing southwest, advises satellite expert Marco Langbroek.
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The rocket may be better seen from other countries on Saturday. That’s because the rocket flies so high that it is illuminated by the sun. You no longer see a clear rocket, rather a bright dot.
Or actually two: the Crew Dragon, the capsule where the astronauts are located, was disconnected from the Falcon 9 rocket with which it was launched shortly before the arrival. If you use binoculars, you should be able to see both parts separately. That dot goes rather quickly: with two minutes it disappears behind the horizon.
Cloud
There is a possibility that a price correction can also be seen. That previously happened with a launch of the freight version of the Crew Dragon, it said Long pants earlier against RTL News. “With a steering rocket, some gas is then emitted. You see that maneuver as a cloud.”
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But there is still a good chance that the launch will be canceled tomorrow. There is a sixty percent chance of a thunderstorm in Florida, says Magdel Erasmus, meteorologist at Buienradar. “Of course it has to be viewed per minute, but it could be that it is canceled just before launch due to dangerous weather conditions.”
Commercial business
So there is only a forty percent chance that the launch will go well. If it goes on and goes well, American astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will make history. Then they become the first people to leave our planet with a spaceship from a commercial company. The Crew Dragon is built by SpaceX, the company of businessman and Tesla boss Elon Musk.
But things can still go wrong even after the launch. “Space travel is still dangerous,” said correspondent Erik Mouthaan previously. “People are waiting with their buttocks squeezed. It will be an exciting moment.”
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It has been nine years since the Americans launched a manned spaceship from home. The last manned US flight was in July 2011. In the meantime, the United States depended on Russia. In recent years, that country was the only one able to bring people to the International Space Station and back.
Loss of face
“Many Americans saw that as a loss of face,” says Mouthaan. “Having to travel to Kazakhstan every time to go into space was a disaster.”
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