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SpaceX, the missile company of high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, launched four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station.
The full-fledged mission is the first time NASA has sent a crew into orbit aboard a privately owned spacecraft.
SpaceX’s new Crew Dragon capsule, renamed Resilience, took off from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on Monday at 7:27 pm from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
An air leak caused the capsule pressure to drop unexpectedly less than two hours before launch, but technicians said they had successfully conducted a check and the scheduled launch was still in progress.
The 27-hour journey to the space station, a laboratory orbiting 400 km above the Earth, was initially supposed to begin on Saturday.
However, the launch was postponed by a day due to predictions of wind gusts – remnants of tropical storm Eta – that would make it difficult for the Falcon 9 to return to the reusable booster stage, NASA said.
The astronauts donned their custom white flight suits and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center’s scheduled launch pad at 4.30pm in three white Tesla SUVs, flanked by NASA and SpaceX personnel.
Vice President Mike Pence attended the launch and said in advance that under President Donald Trump, America had “renewed our commitment to lead human space exploration.”
President-elect Joe Biden tweeted his congratulations, saying the launch was “a testament to the power of science.”
NASA is calling flight its first “operational” mission for a missile and crew vehicle system that has been in the works for 10 years.
It represents a new era of commercially developed spacecraft – owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA – to send Americans into orbit.
A SpaceX Crew Dragon test flight in August, carrying just two astronauts to and from the space station, marked NASA’s first human space mission to launch from U.S. soil in nine years, following the end of the space shuttle program in 2011. .
In the following years, US astronauts had to hitchhike to enter orbit aboard the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
The Resilience crew includes Commander Mike Hopkins and other NASA astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover, and physicist Shannon Walker.
They will be joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who will make his third journey into space after previously flying the US shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.
Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX who is also the CEO of the electric carmaker and battery maker Tesla, probably won’t watch the Kennedy Space Center launch control room take off as usual, NASA officials said.
Musk said on Saturday he “most likely” has a moderate case of COVID-19.
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