Musk鈥檚 SpaceX Dragon blasts off on historic NASA mission
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ELON Musk’s rocket company SpaceX launched four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station on Sunday, NASA’s first full-fledged mission sending a crew into orbit aboard a privately owned spacecraft.
SpaceX’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule, which the crew has dubbed Resilience, lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:27pm eastern US time (0027 GMT on Monday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“That was one heck of a ride,” astronaut Mike Hopkins said from Crew Dragon to SpaceX mission control about an hour after liftoff. “There was a lot of smiles.”
Cheers and applause erupted at SpaceX Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, after the capsule reached orbit and the first-stage booster landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
Crew Dragon will gradually raise its orbit for the next 27 hours through a series of onboard thruster firings, giving the astronauts time to eat pre-packaged dinners and roughly eight hours to rest before docking at the International Space Station at 11pm eastern time on Monday. The four will join two Russians and one American aboard the station, and stay for six months.
An air leak caused an unexpected drop in capsule pressure less than two hours before launch, NASA officials said. But technicians said they conducted a successful leak check, and the scheduled launch was still on.
The Resilience crew includes Hopkins and two fellow NASA astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker. They were joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, making his third trip to space after previously flying on the US shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.
The ride was originally scheduled to begin on Saturday. But the launch was postponed for a day due to forecasts of gusty winds — remnants of Tropical Storm Eta — that would have made a return landing for the Falcon 9’s reusable booster stage difficult, NASA officials said. The astronauts donned their custom white flight suits and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad on schedule at 4:30pm in three white Tesla SUVs,.
They were flanked by NASA and SpaceX personnel.
Besides its sleek design and high-tech features, the Dragon capsule is quite spacious — it can carry up to seven people. Previous space capsules have launched with no more than three.
The extra room in this newest capsule was used for science experiments and supplies.
NASA is calling the flight its first “operational” mission for a rocket and crew-vehicle system that was 10 years in the making.
It represents a new era of commercial spacecraft — owned and operated by a private entity rather than NASA.
A trial flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon in August, carrying just two astronauts to and from the International Space Station, marked NASA’s first human space mission launched from US soil in nine years.
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