The historic launch that would take NASA astronauts to the ISS from US soil has been cleared for launch next week despite the coronavirus pandemic and the departure of the agency’s human spaceflight lead. It’ll be the first time astronauts will take off from the US since NASA’s space shuttle program ended in 2011, when they started hitching rides on Russian Soyuz capsules.
NASA and SpaceX have confirmed that they’ve had “a very successful launch readiness review” at a virtual press conference. Steve Jurczyk, the agency’s Associate Administrator, said they did “a thorough review of all the systems and all the risks” and unanimously decided that everything’s in place for a May 27th launch.