Crew Dragon 3

(cont'd from yesterday's post)

"American astronauts haven't launched to orbit aboard a homegrown spacecraft since July 2011, when the space shuttle Atlantis lifted off on the final mission of the shuttle program."

But if everything goes all right, we  will have astronauts in space again this summer. Next July is the SpaceX target for a "crewed demonstration flight to the ISS (Demon-2)". On March 1 the selected astronauts answered questions for journalists on the video below.

Two of them have shuttle flight experience. They say the shuttle's controls had two thousand switches while Dragon has just thirty buttons and a touch screen. Another says they tend to get nervous not before a flight, but afterward. Two of them are married to astronauts.

Boeing, in addition to SpaceX, partners with NASA to develop a crewed space craft called Starliner. They have not yet announced a date for first test flight.