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NASA Weekly Update – May 26, 2020
This week we are going to make history! An enormous amount of hard work by our Commercial Crew Program team and many others will come to fruition when we successfully launch into orbit American astronauts on an American-made rocket from American soil for the first time in nearly a decade.
- Top News: Last week, I announced that we are renaming our WFIRST mission the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. This next-generation space telescope will honor NASA’s first chief astronomer who paved the way for space-based telescopes.
- Next Up: Tomorrow, May 27, NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission will launch astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft on the company’s Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station. The launch is scheduled for 4:33 p.m. EDT, but NASA TV will begin coverage at 12:15 p.m. Due to the coronavirus (COVID-19), we are restricting employee engagement at Kennedy Space Center; however, we encourage you and your family to join our agency’s virtual celebration from your home.
- Shout Out: We owe a big thanks to all the teams across the agency who are preparing centers for increased on-site operations. I especially want to thank our COVID-19 team at Stennis Space Center for their dedicated efforts to ensure we can start preliminary preparations for the Green Run test on the core stage of our Space Launch System rocket. We have a lot of work to do, and this team is helping us do it safely amid the coronavirus pandemic.
We are going to remember this week for the rest of our lives. A new era of human commercial crew spaceflight is here because of the tireless devotion of so many of you and our partners, including many of our interagency partners behind the scenes. The Demo-2 mission will demonstrate our nation’s extraordinary ability to reach historic milestones – and do it first – by achieving it together. Let’s launch America!
Ad astra,
Jim Bridenstine
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