Billionaires Elon Musk and Richard Branson see their space forays halted

Unfavorable atmospheric conditions and not the coronavirus COVID-19 have caused the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to abort its most important space launch in the last 9 years. The regression sequence that was supposed to give the green light to the ignition of the engines of the Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon manned space capsule on top had to be stopped in the late afternoon of Wednesday, May 27, 16 minutes before its liftoff, throwing out the scheduled first trip of an American spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS) after 2011. 

The flight director suspended the countdown due to adverse weather conditions and the danger that lightning could strike the top of the launcher and cause a disaster. Low clouds, low visibility and rain were the dominant tonic during the day, which forced to try again on Saturday, May 30, at 21:22, Spanish peninsular time, according to the orbital mechanics that govern the movement of the space complex located about 400 kilometers high.  

An exceptional witness who arrived from Washington to witness the historic launch was President Donald Trump, who accompanied by his wife Melania had arrived at the Kennedy Space Center an hour before the launch, when astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley were already sitting on board the Dragon spacecraft. The President had time to talk to both of them and wish them "good luck and God be with you," encouraging them by saying that "It's a dangerous business, but they're the best there is".

Unlike Trump, Vice President Mike Pence had traveled to Florida with much more time, enough to meet with the astronauts' families before the flight. 

Always protected by a face mask, Pence was also present when the two astronauts left the enclosure where they were isolated to climb into the Tesla Model X electric vehicles that were to take them to the foot of the launch pad, located at a distance of 14 kilometers. Billionaire Elon Musk, founder of PayPal, Tesla and SpaceX, the latter the manufacturer of the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon capsule, has taken advantage of the circumstance to make his vehicles available to NASA. 

Once the suspension of the mission was confirmed, Trump refused to comment to the media and immediately went to Air Force One to return to Washington in a bad mood. 

A similar setback had occurred just 48 hours earlier to fellow billionaire Sir Richard Branson, also involved in space projects in the United States. The British businessman had scheduled for May 25 the inaugural flight of his Virgin Orbit project, which consisted of testing his space launcher called LauncherOne. In this case, technical reasons made the test, held at the other end of the country, over the Pacific Ocean, a failure. 

The idea was to launch a 20-metre-long, 30-ton rocket from a modified Boeing 747 Jumbo jet from an altitude of 10 kilometres, and to see how its engines would ignite and ascend to place a 300-kilogram satellite into orbit at an altitude of 230 kilometres. 

The test was carried out in the vicinity of St. Nicholas Island, 91 miles - about 146 kilometers - from Los Angeles, where the U.S. Defense Department tests weapons systems, aircraft and missiles. Branson's plane, called " Cosmic Girl", took off from the Mojave space port in California in the late afternoon.  

After all the preliminary checks, the pilots released the rocket under the left wing of the aircraft and the engine of its first stage ignited. But just a few seconds later it went off for reasons that are still unknown and, as it lost momentum, the vehicle described a parabola, got lost and fell into the ocean. The technical failure has not dampened the hopes of the British businessman, whose second LauncherOne is about to be completed and more are on the way. 

Depending on the results of the research ordered by Richard Branson, the engineers may advise to continue the test programme, make technical modifications to the rocket or carry out additional tests. 

The LauncherOne project is an initiative announced in July 2012 by Richard Branson and his space travel company Virgin Galactic. Initially the idea is to release the rocket from an original WhiteKnightTwo aircraft designed to serve as a transport for the SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle. But Virgin Galactic modified its initial planning and acquired a Boeing 747 Jumbo from Virgin Atlantic Airline in 2015 - a company owned by Branson himself - baptizing it as " Cosmic Girl" and restoring it so that it could be fixed under the rocket below its wings. 

In order to carry out test flights and operate with the blessings of the U.S. Departments of Commerce and Defense, he established the companies VOX Space and Virgin Orbit in Long Beach, Florida, in March 2017.