![]() On Saturday, stormy weather in Florida threatened another postponement for most of the day, but then the skies began to clear in the afternoonjust in time. Ultimately, NASA hopes to rely in part on its commercial partners as it works to send astronauts back to the moon in the next few years, and on to Mars in the 2030s.īefore setting out for the launch pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV - another Musk product - Behnken pantomimed a hug of his 6-year-old son, Theo, and said: “Are you going to listen to Mommy and make her life easy?” Hurley blew kisses to his 10-year-old son and wife.Ī launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes to go in the countdown because of lightning. Musk said earlier in the week that the project is aimed at “reigniting the dream of space and getting people fired up about the future.” Boeing’s spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021. In the intervening years, NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation. astronauts to and from the space station. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA, the longest such hiatus in its history. With the on-time liftoff, SpaceX, founded by Musk, the Tesla electric-car visionary, became the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the U.S., Russia and China. “Maybe there’s an opportunity here for America to maybe pause and look up and see a bright, shining moment of hope at what the future looks like, that the United States of America can do extraordinary things even in difficult times,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said before launch. NASA officials and others held out hope the flight would would be a morale-booster. over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. ![]() The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed over 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. The two men are scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station on Sunday for a stay of up to four months, after which they will return to Earth in a Right Stuff-style splashdown at sea. “Let’s light this candle,” Hurley said just before ignition, borrowing the words used by Alan Shepard on America’s first human spaceflight, in 1961. Minutes later, they safely entered orbit. from the same launch pad used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon a half-century ago. NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a sleek, white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 3:22 p.m. soil for the first time in nearly a decade. A rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era of commercial space travel and putting NASA back in the business of launching astronauts from U.S.
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