The two astronauts blasting off today to the International Space Station in the first such voyage since 2011 are best friends who both married fellow astronauts.
Bob Behnken, 49, from Saint Ann, Missouri, and Doug Hurley, 53, from Apalachin, New York, are at the helm of SpaceX’s first ever crewed spaceflight.
The pair are due to leave Cape Canaveral at 4.33pm EDT, in a historic mission which unites NASA and SpaceX.
With President Donald Trump and his wife Melania watching, plus Mike Pence, the two men will become the first to fly from American soil to the ISS in nine years.
Bob Behnken (left) and Doug Hurley are set to become the first people to fly to the ISS from U.S. soil in nine years on Wednesday, when they jet off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The two men are firm friends, who both served as military pilots before joining NASA, and both married fellow astronauts
NASA and SpaceX have urged all other spectators to stay home because of the coronavirus pandemic, but crowds are still expected to gather in the tradition of space shuttle launches.
The last time astronauts launched from Florida was on NASA’s final space shuttle flight in July 2011. Hurley was the pilot of that mission.
This time, the pair will spend between one and four months there, before returning to Earth.
‘We’ve been close friends since we started as astronauts almost 20 years ago,’ said Hurley.
‘So being lucky enough to fly with your best friend – I think there are a lot of people who’d love to do that, and we get to do it.
‘We’ve spent a ton of time together. We could have gone two directions with that – we could have got to the point where we didn’t want to be together. But we’re closer.’
Bob Behnken (left) and Doug Hurley will make history as the first people to crew a SpaceX flight to the International Space Station – a huge milestone for Elon Musk’s company, and for the NASA-SpaceX partnership
Both men have made two previous space shuttle flights, having joined NASA in 2000 – two of 17 astronauts selected by the agency that year.
Before then both were military pilots.
And both met their wives while training as astronauts.
Megan McArthur, wife of Bob Behnken, joined NASA in 2000 – where she met her future husband
Behnken’s wife is Megan McArthur, an oceanographer who was part of the shuttle mission that made one last visit in 2009 to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope.
The couple have a six-year-old son, Theodore.
Hurley is married to Karen Nyberg, who spent nearly six months on the International Space Station in 2013 and who retired from NASA at the end of March.
Hurley and Nyberg also have one son, ten-year-old Jack.
The camaraderie between the two was evident in a video which NASA produced before Wednesday’s launch, entitled Know Your Crew.
Asked what Hurley’s favorite music was, Behnken joked: ‘He likes country and western!’
Asked what Hurley was best at, during the mission training, Behnken replied, laughing: ‘Obscure things.’
He added: ‘If we had to get some useless information Doug is always the repository for that. He’s the trivia master, between the two of us.’
Karen Nyberg, wife of Doug Hurley, pictured in the International Space Station’s Kibo laboratory. Nyberg and Hurley have one son together, as do McArthur and her astronaut husband, Bob Behnken. The foursome have become firm friends over the past 20 years
Hurley was also full of praise for his friend.
‘Bob is just one of those guys who is competent, smart, dependable – particularly these last two years, working with SpaceX,’ he said.
Their remarkable friendship is something which SpaceX is keen to emphasize.
‘I wanted to make sure everyone at SpaceX understood and knew Bob and Doug as astronauts, as test pilots — badass — but also as dads and husbands,’ said Gwynne Shotwell, president of the company that built the Crew Dragon spacecraft that will carry the men to orbit, at a news conference this month.
‘I wanted to bring some humanity to this very deeply technical effort as well.’
Megan McArthur and Bob Behnken, pictured at the NASA Stellar Awards dinner, in Houston in April 2012. Both are astronauts, and met while training together
Karen Nyberg and Doug Hughes, with their son Jack, pictured in Moscow in May 2013. At the time Nyberg, Soyuz Commander Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Luca Parmitano of the European Space Agency were preparing for their launch May 29, Kazakh time, in their Soyuz TMA-09M spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan for a six-month mission on the International Space Station
Hurley described the mission as ‘the crewed test flight for the SpaceX Dragon.’
The Demo-2 mission, as it is officially known, is essentially the final test phase of Crew Dragon, after which it and 9, the rocket which carries it to orbit, will be certified for regular operational use by NASA.
That means it will begin offering regular transportation services for astronaut crew to and from the ISS, joining Russia’s Soyuz as a means to travel to the orbital science platform.
‘This is a big moment in time,’ said Jim Bridenstine, NASA administrator, on the eve of the launch.
‘It’s been nine years since we’ve had this opportunity.’
The new Crew Dragon capsule will take off from Launch Pad 39A, the same from which Neil Armstrong and his Apollo crew mates left for their historic journey to the Moon.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Crew Dragon spacecraft attached sits on launch pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center on May 27, hours before the expected launch. Donald Trump and his wife, plus Mike Pence, are traveling to Florida to witness the historic event
The launch puts Elon Musk’s SpaceX on the cusp of becoming the first private company to put astronauts in orbit, something achieved by just three countries – Russia, the U.S. and China.
It is a remarkable achievement for the South African-born entrepreneur, who founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX) in 2002.
Gradually Musk, an eccentric, marijuana-smoking tycoon, has earned the trust of the planet’s largest space agency, NASA.
By 2012, SpaceX had become the first private company to dock a cargo capsule at the ISS, resupplying the station regularly ever since.
It charges NASA $62 million for a standard Falcon 9 trip.
Behnken explained: ‘It has a lot of features and capabilities that hopefully you’ll never have to use in a real mission, but Doug and I will make sure that they are all ready in case you do.’
Asked what he was most looking forward to, Behnken said it was returning safely to Earth at the end of the mission, and splashing into the sea.
‘The thing I’m most looking forward to is going into the water at the end of the mission, and seeing how we go through that experience,’ he said.
‘I’m expecting a little bit of vomiting to happen.
‘So when we get to go through that together in the water – it’s kind of a weird thing to say – but it will be a celebratory event.’