Public-private partnership with Elon Musk’s company to send four astronauts to international space station on Saturday

In a rocket ship perfectly named for the year of a global pandemic, three American astronauts and one from Japan are scheduled to blast off from Florida on Saturday evening as Nasa finally returns to the business of routine crewed spaceflight.

The 7.49pm launch of the SpaceX capsule Resilience from the Kennedy Space Center, a mission officially designated as Crew 1, will be the first time since the final flights of the space shuttle fleet in 2011 that the US space agency has its own operational rotating program of sending humans to the international space station.

Doug Loverro quits ahead of next week’s mission to send two astronauts to the International Space Station on a SpaceX flight

A leading figure at Nasa responsible for the agency’s human spaceflight programs has suddenly resigned just days before the US is set to send astronauts back into space from American soil for the first time since the Space Shuttle program was retired almost a decade ago.

Doug Loverro, the official in charge of the human spaceflight division, left on Monday, Nasa said.