SpaceX spaceship with four astronauts in motion

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the “Crew Dragon” capsule is launched with four astronauts on NASA’s first routine commercial mission at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, USA on November 15, 2020.

Thom Baur / Reuters

(dpa)

Six months after its historic maiden flight, the “Crew Dragon” spacecraft from SpaceX took off for the first time for a regular mission into space. On Sunday evening (November 15), the capsule took off with four astronauts on board at Cape Canaveral in the US state of Florida, live recordings from NASA’s space agency showed. “The spaceship is coming,” NASA tweeted.

Immediately after the launch, US President-elect Joe Biden congratulated him on Twitter. The beginning is a testament to the power of science “and what we can achieve if we hold back our innovation, ingenuity and determination”. Current US President Donald Trump celebrated the “big start” on Twitter later. NASA was a disaster when it came to power, meanwhile the space agency “has become by far the” hottest “and most advanced space center in the world,” Trump wrote.

The “Crew Dragon” took off at the head of a “Falcon 9” rocket, the first stage of which returned to Earth as expected after a few minutes and landed on a floating platform – a great success for SpaceX. The capsule is expected to dock with the International Space Station on Monday evening (November 16) after more than 27 hours of flight. American NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover and Shannon Walker as well as Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi will remain aboard the ISS for six months and will monitor various experiments. Astronaut Kate Rubins and her Russian colleagues Sergej Ryschikow and Sergej Kud-Swertschkow are currently on the station.

Traveling with the “Crew Dragon” (left to right) NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, Commander Mike Hopkins and Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi of the Aerospace Exploration Agency.

SpaceX / AP

The newly arrived crew – “Crew-1” – is the first to regularly fly the ISS in the “Crew Dragon” after the manned test was successful in the spring. The two US astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken left for the ISS during this test in May and returned in August. It was the first time, after a nearly nine-year hiatus, that astronauts had returned to orbit from American soil – and the first time they had been promoted by a private space company. SpaceX previously only carried cargo on the ISS.

The last time astronauts flew to the ISS was in the summer of 2011 on the space shuttle “Atlantis”. Subsequently, NASA took its space shuttle fleet out of service for cost reasons and has since been dependent on Russia for ISS missions. At around 80 million euros per flight with the Soyuz capsule, this too was expensive and scratched the American ego.