Tech billionaire Elon Musk’s private company SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station. This is National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA’s) first full-fledged mission involving sending crew into orbit through a privately-owned spacecraft.
NASA astronauts Michael Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, and Soichi Noguchi from Japan were sent into orbit aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida’s Cape Canaveral.
The Dragon will ferry the astronauts to the space station on SpaceX’s first operational trip following a test flight with a two-person crew that returned from the orbiting lab three months ago.
NASA said, “The mission marked the beginning of a new era, where private firms will send astronauts to low-earth orbit. The astronauts will be in space for six months.” The Dragon capsule on top of the capsule has been named Resilience by the crew, in view of the coronavirus crisis.
The latest launch, known as the Crew-1 mission, comes 18 years after Elon Musk founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp, with the ultimate goal of populating other planets. The Crew-1 mission marks a crucial milestone in the development of a space industry in which private-sector companies provide business and tourism services in low-earth orbit.
In the Crew-1 mission, Commander Michael Hopkins, 51, an Air Force colonel and test pilot, will make his second trip to the space station, seven years after his first.
How SpaceX became a go to company for NASA?
NASA resorted to private companies to haul cargo and crew to the International Space Station (ISS) after the shuttle fleet retired in 2011 and SpaceX qualified for both. While the first NASA-SpaceX launch marked Kennedy Space Station back in the astronaut-launching action, it has given NASA an opportunity to avoid buying seats worth $90 million each on Russian Soyuz rockets. SpaceX has officially become a reliable private firm for NASA to resume its space shuttle programme mostly because of its first successful launch and return of SpaceX astronauts earlier this year. This is momentous for Musk’s company but it has budded from the tragic incident of February 1, 2003, when the space shuttle Columbia was extensively damaged while entering the Earth and caused the death of all seven astronauts aboard. It was this launch nearly two decades early that led to the US administration of President George W Bush to announce decommissioning of the space shuttle after the completion of ISS in 2011.
