Countdown as SpaceX, NASA

The new capsule will blast off on board a rocket
built by SpaceX -- the space company of billionaire Elon Musk -- at 0249 (0749 GMT) on Saturday from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida. destination is the International Space Station, which it is scheduled to reach by Sunday, with a return to Earth next Friday.
The excitement was palpable Friday at Cape Canaveral, where a day earlier the rocket was wheeled out of its hangar and staged in a vertical position on the legendary launch pad where the Apollo Moon missions took off.
"It´s been a long eight years," said Bob Cabana, the Kennedy Space Center´s director and a former astronaut.
"It´s exciting to see a crewed vehicle, the SpaceX Dragon, up there on a Falcon 9 on pad 39A," said Cabana, who witnessed the last space shuttle flight return to Cape Canaveral on July 21, 2011.
After the shuttle program was shuttered in 2011 after a 30-year run, NASA began outsourcing the logistics of its space missions.
The sky over the launch site was clear Friday, with meteorologists saying there was an 80 percent chance of conditions being favorable overnight.
"When you´re here, right, there´s a pride in the country. It´s different," said Mark Geyer, director of the Johnson Space Center, where US astronauts are based. "There´s a pride in what the United States and its teams can accomplish."