SpaceX gets OK for Astronaut Launch

NASA officials gave the go-ahead for SpaceX and the agency to continue preparations for a historic liftoff of two astronauts on a rocket. The launch is scheduled on May 27th 2020 from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. The astronauts Hurley and Behnken will be riding inside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket. They will arrive at the space station the next morning. Their stay in orbit was originally planned for just two weeks but will now be extended, because the station is short-staffed. Another SpaceX next project is to test sun visor on internet satellites to make them less bright. The satellites are too bright, affecting observations and data collection. The mission will carry a test of the company’s deployable visor, a sunshade that will make the Starlink spacecraft less visible to ground based telescopes. Short-term, SpaceX wants to have 1500 Starlinks in low-Earth orbit. The long-term goal is to have tens of thousands of satellites in space, helping to blanket the Earth with high-speed internet connections. All future Starlink satellites will have sun visors.