Elon Musk's most inspiring story.

Astronauts have launched to orbit from the United States for the first time in nearly a decade, heralding a thrilling new era of human spaceflight.

On May 30, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft lifted off on a Falcon 9 rocket from the historic Launch Complex 39-A at Cape Canaveral in Florida – once used to launch astronauts to the Moon, and to launch the Space Shuttle – on the Demo-2 mission.

However it was the turn of a new breed of spacecraft, a commercial venture funded by NASA. Crew Dragon is the first-ever private human vehicle to head for orbit, the result of years of hard work.

"The trampoline is working!" SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said after the launch of the Demo-2 test flight to the International Space Station (ISS). Musk was referring to an April 2014 barb by Dimitry Rogozin, who at the time was Russia's deputy prime minister. Today, Rogozin is the chief of Russia's space agency, Roscosmos.

Rogozin was irked back then by sanctions imposed by the United States in response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Some of those sanctions targeted the Russian space industry (as well as individuals, including Rogozin), and Rogozin argued that the measures would end up hurting NASA and the global space effort in general. After all, the American space agency had relied completely on Russian Soyuz rockets and spacecraft to get their astronauts to the ISS since the space shuttles retired in 2011.

"After analyzing the sanctions against our space industry, I suggest to the USA to bring their astronauts to the International Space Station using a trampoline," Rogozin said via Twitter at the time. (His post was in Russian; the English translation comes via Google Translate.)

NASA has been grooming private industry to fill the shuttle's shoes since 2010. In September 2014, the agency awarded multibillion-dollar contracts to SpaceX and Boeing to finish developing their spacecraft — capsules known as Crew Dragon and the CST-100 Starliner, respectively — and fly six operational crewed missions to and from the ISS.

Demo-2 is the last big hurdle SpaceX needs to clear before beginning those contracted flights. And everything is going well with the test mission so far; Crew Dragon docked with the ISS as planned on May 31,2020 safely delivering NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to the orbiting lab.

Rogozin took the Demo-2 success, and Musk's trampoline riposte, in stride. The Russian official congratulated NASA chief Jim Bridenstine and wished NASA luck in getting commercial crew missions officially up and running.

"Please convey my sincere greetings to elonmusk (I loved his joke) and SpaceX team. Looking forward to further cooperation!"

Musk responded to Rogozin "Thanks sir, haha. We look forward to mutually beneficial and prosperous long-term cooperation."

Demo-2 is scheduled to last one to four months; NASA and SpaceX have not yet decided on the mission's duration. If everything goes well through splashdown, SpaceX's first contracted astronaut-carrying mission, called Crew-1, could launch as soon as late August, NASA officials have said.

Boeing isn't quite ready to launch astronauts yet. Starliner failed to meet up with the ISS as planned on an uncrewed test flight this past December. The capsule will refly that test mission before proceeding to crewed flight.

"This is everything America has to offer in its purest form," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the launch. "Times are tough right now. But I hope this moment in time is an opportunity for everybody to reflect on humanity and what we can do when we work together."

 

The astronauts arrived at the launch site in a Tesla car, supplied by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s other company. They rode an elevator up to the spacecraft at the top of the rocket, towering 70 meters above the ground, before entering.

After running through pre-flight checks and getting approval to launch from mission control, the spacecraft lifted off despite the possibility of inclement weather. The launch had been delayed from May 27 because of bad weather, but things cleared enough this time for the launch to go ahead.

The astronauts will now make the journey to the ISS, where they will then join the three people already there – NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, and Russian cosmonauts Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner – who traveled on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft earlier this year.

Crew Dragon will autonomously dock with the ISS, although Hurley will briefly manually control the spacecraft beforehand to check all its systems are working.

NASA had been paying Russia more than $90 million per seat for rides, at some embarrassment to the agency over the last nine years.

In 2004, NASA was directed by President Bush to retire the Space Shuttle and find alternatives. It flew for the final time in July 2011, the last time humans had launched to orbit from U.S. soil – with Doug Hurley himself flying the shuttle, Atlantis.

Under President Obama, a new program began in 2010 – called the Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program – to replace the shuttle with privately-built spacecraft. SpaceX was ultimately contracted, along with Boeing and its Starliner vehicle, to build new spacecraft for NASA. They received $2.6 billion and $4.2 billion in funding respectively.

Today is the initial culmination of that program, with SpaceX being the first of the two to launch. Boeing is expected to launch its Starliner spacecraft with humans for the first time in spring 2021, after a botched test flight in December 2019.

SpaceX has years of experience flying spacecraft, having launched its cargo version of the Dragon spacecraft for the first time in 2010. Since then it has flown more than a dozen cargo missions to the ISS for NASA

In March 2019 it performed an uncrewed test flight of its Crew Dragon spacecraft to the ISS, a major test for the company. However, in April 2019 that spacecraft exploded in a routine test back on Earth after a valve malfunction, a major setback for SpaceX in its ambition to launch humans.

Getting back on track to launch just a year later has been very impressive. Today’s flight no doubt marks the biggest moment in the company’s young history, having been founded in just 2002, and the pressure was on for everything to go smoothly.

Musk founded SpaceX with the goal of launching humans to Mars – something it hopes to achieve with its Starship vehicle it is currently working on, a new spacecraft designed to be the successor to Crew Dragon. SpaceX hopes to fly that vehicle to space with humans later this decade.

But proving they can launch humans safely is a crucial first step in that journey. With today’s successful flight, Crew Dragon can begin a new exciting period of commercial spaceflight never seen before.

SpaceX is under contract with NASA to deliver astronauts to the ISS, with its first fully operational launch – called Crew-1 – scheduled to take place in the coming months with four astronauts on board, following the Demo-2 test mission.

The company also plans, however, to use Crew Dragon to launch paying customers into space. This could include space tourists hoping to visit the space station, or other destinations – such as orbiting space hotels – at a cost of $20 million per seat.

Already several such flights have been announced, with space for up to seven people on each. One rumored customer is Tom Cruise, who Bridenstine said earlier this year had contacted NASA about flying on Crew Dragon to the ISS and shooting a movie there.

While Crew Dragon is limited to flying to low Earth orbit, SpaceX is hoping that its Starship vehicle – which will supposedly be able to carry more than 100 people on each flight – can reach more distant destinations.

This may include the Moon and Mars. Already NASA has picked Starship, along with two other vehicles, as a potential way for the agency to reach the Moon in 2024 as part of their Artemis program. And Musk has made no secret of his desire to land humans on Mars.

Before all that can happen, there’s the small matter of the Demo-2 mission to handle. It’s easy to overuse the word “historic” for this mission, but there’s little doubt that it is, and marks a major moment in the history of spaceflight.

SpaceX, a company founded just two years before Facebook, has now achieved something only three countries (the U.S., Russia, and China) have before in history – launching humans to space. No matter what happens next, that in itself is an incredible achievement.

"I’m really quite overcome with emotion," Musk said following the launch. "It’s been 18 years working towards this goal, so it’s hard to believe that it’s happened."