SpaceX and NASA begin first operational astronaut mission to space

Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX sent four astronauts on a flight to the International Space Station on Sunday, the first full-blown NASA mission to send a crew into orbit aboard a proprietary spacecraft. private.

SpaceX’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule, which the crew has dubbed Resilience, lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 7:27 p.m. ET (0027 GMT Monday) from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral. , Florida.

“It was an incredible journey,” said astronaut Mike Hopkins from Crew Dragon to SpaceX mission control about an hour after liftoff. “There were many smiles.”

Crew Dragon will gradually raise its orbit over the next 27 hours through a series of onboard thruster shots, with the goal of docking at the International Space Station at 11 p.m. ET Monday.

An air leak caused an unexpected drop in capsule pressure less than two hours before launch, NASA officials said. But technicians said they ran a successful leak check and the scheduled launch was still underway.

The 27-hour journey to the space station, a laboratory orbiting about 250 miles (400 km) above Earth, was originally scheduled to begin Saturday. But the launch was postponed for a day due to forecasts of gusty winds, remnants of Tropical Storm Eta, which would have made it difficult to land back for the Falcon 9’s reusable booster stage, NASA officials said.

The astronauts donned their custom white flight suits and arrived at the Kennedy Space Center launch pad as scheduled at 4:30 p.m. in three white Tesla SUVs, flanked by NASA and SpaceX personnel.

SpaceX mission operator Jay Aranha, speaking from company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, told the crew to “have an incredible journey and know that we are all one.”

“And now is the time for us to do our part, Crew 1 for everyone,” Hopkins said.

Vice President Mike Pence attended the launch and said ahead of time that under President Donald Trump, the United States had “renewed our commitment to lead human space exploration.”

President-elect Joe Biden tweeted his congratulations and said the launch was “a testament to the power of science.”

FIRST PRIVATE MISSION

NASA is calling the flight its first “operational” mission for a rocket and crew vehicle system that took 10 years to manufacture. It represents a new era of commercially developed spacecraft, owned by a private entity and operated by a private entity rather than NASA, to send Americans into orbit.

A test flight of the SpaceX Crew Dragon in August, carrying just two astronauts to and from the space station, marked NASA’s first human space mission to launch from US soil in nine years, following the end of the shuttle program. space in 2011. In the intervening years, American astronauts have had to hitchhike into orbit aboard Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft.

The Resilience crew includes Commander Mike Hopkins and two fellow NASA astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker. They were joined by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who made his third trip to space after previously flying the American shuttle in 2005 and Soyuz in 2009.

Musk, the billionaire SpaceX CEO who is also CEO of battery and electric car maker Tesla Inc, likely will not have seen liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center launch control room, NASA officials said. Musk said Saturday that he “most likely” has a moderate case of COVID-19.

SpaceX and NASA have conducted contact tracing and determined that Musk had not come into contact with anyone who interacted with the astronauts.

“Our astronauts have been in quarantine for weeks and shouldn’t have had contact with anyone,” NASA chief Jim Bridenstine said Friday. “They must be in good shape.”

NASA contracted with SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to develop competing space capsules intended to replace its shuttle program and divert the United States from reliance on Russian rockets to send astronauts into space.