Roughly 19 hours after launch, they will dock with the space station, then float inside to join three spacefarers who have been living and working there since April.
If all goes well, astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley will fly the spaceship, called Crew Dragon, to the International Space Station (ISS). The first footprints on Mars could belong to this geologist “This is a whole new way of sending people to space,” says Robert Cabana, a former NASA astronaut who is now director of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Perhaps most significantly, it is the first time in 17 years that anyone has launched a new type of spaceship to carry humans to Earth orbit (see ‘How humans have reached orbit’). It will be the first time a private company has flown humans to orbit, and the first time astronauts have launched from US soil since NASA retired the Space Shuttle in 2011. If the launch succeeds, it will mark a number of firsts in human spaceflight. On Wednesday, if the weather in Florida cooperates, two NASA astronauts plan to strap themselves into a capsule atop a SpaceX rocket and travel to space. It docked with the International Space Station on 31 May.
#SPACESHIP IN SPACE UPDATE#
Update 31 May: SpaceX’s Crew Dragon lifted off successfully at 3.22 p.m. But striving to make your body more truly your own is a powerful and worthwhile endeavor.NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken will be the first spacefarers to launch to orbit on a privately built rocket. If you get a tattoo or have cosmetic surgery, you become more authentically who you’re meant to be, because you made that choice about your body. When you change your body, it often becomes more you. Yet it’s an extremely powerful way of claiming your own self. The idea of taking technology (or anything, for that matter) and making it a part of your body is not that radical. Medical intervention affects our bodily functions, keeps us alive. Striving to make your body more truly your own is a powerful and worthwhile endeavor. They persistently re-draw the lines of what they consider self.
Characters rebuild their bodies to affirm their identity, sometimes in mundane ways and sometimes grotesquely, adding breasts, removing moles, spewing their organs across a cottage floor. They’re not all successful! But the struggle itself is glorious, I think, and revelatory. My characters are embodied, and always striving to figure out what that means. Splendid Anatomies is about the ways different characters try to claim their own bodies, through modifications, enhancements, magic, sometimes even through destroying them. We use the tools we have-clothing and cosmetics, nutrition and exercise, hormones, prostheses, dentistry and contact lenses-to become our best or most true selves.
And so we change them, we build them into better things, we incorporate our tools into them.
(I’m not sure I’d want to.) But for right now, human beings are stuck in them, with all their messiness and all their complications. Maybe in some utopian future, we’ll have the technology to transcend our bodies. And somebody tell me, how do their feet stay on the ship’s floor? (We miss you!) Otherwise, Star Wars bodies seem to function fine, harnessed or not, hurtling through space or grounded on planets of varying gravitational pulls. Of course, Carrie Fisher was truly and historically strangled by her bra due to gravitational strangeness-and moonlight-but that’s the actor, not the character. Aliens might have exciting powers or green skin, but it’s usually played for visual effect, and we don’t learn what it feels like to be in a different sort of body. Afterward, the bodily effects of space travel are mostly forgotten. In one episode of Battlestar Galactica, repeated jumps wreak havoc on the physical wellbeing of the characters-or maybe it’s just lack of sleep. In other space narratives, we might get a flip mention of bodies, but they’re almost never integral to the way characters truly live. Although the story is intriguing, what most interests me is the show’s persistent and realistic portrayal of human bodies, and how living in space-or not-directly affects their function, putting pressure on the bones, organs, muscles, and blood vessels.