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Meet Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, SpaceX’s First NASA Astronauts
They’re best friends and veterans of the astronaut corps, and each is married to another astronaut.
[When to watch SpaceX’s next NASA launch of astronauts.]
It’s the Bob and Doug Show.
On Wednesday, weather permitting, two NASA astronauts, Robert L. Behnken and Douglas G. Hurley, are to be sitting on top of a SpaceX rocket headed to orbit. But NASA and SpaceX officials more often than not just call the pilots of this historic mission “Bob and Doug.”
“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.”
The men’s trip to the space station will be the first from the United States since the retirement of the space shuttles in 2011, and Mr. Behnken and Mr. Hurley, friends and colleagues for two decades, have traveled remarkably similar paths to this moment.
“One of the things that’s really helpful for us as a crew is the long relationship that Doug and I have had,” Mr. Behnken said this month during rounds of interviews with reporters. “We’re kind of at the point in our experience — whether it’s flying in the T-38 or executing in a SpaceX simulation or approaching and docking to the International Space Station — where we, in addition to finishing each other’s sentences, we can predict, you know, almost by body language, what the person’s opinion is or what they’re going to do, what their next action is going to be.”
The rapport and good humor between the astronauts was evident in a video created by NASA. Mr. Behnken said he was looking forward to the splashdown at the end of their mission before adding, with a grin, “I’m expecting a little bit of vomiting, maybe, to happen in that end game. When we get to that opportunity to do that in the water together, it’s kind of a weird thing to say, but I’m looking for that kind of celebratory event.”
Mr. Hurley offered a more serious answer, talking about how he enjoyed working together with a close friend.
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