SpaceX became the first private company to launch astronauts to the International Space Station, marking the culmination of years of collaborative work with NASA on developing human spaceflight capabilities. At 7:27 PM EST (4:27 PM PST), NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Michael Hopkins and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi left Florida's Kennedy Space Center 39-A Launch Pad for the ISS .
SpaceX's human launch program was developed as part of the Commercial Crew program, which saw NASA select two private companies to build astronaut launch systems to transport astronauts to the ISS from US soil. SpaceX was chosen alongside Boeing by NASA in 2014 to create the respective systems and SpaceX's Dragon and Falcon capsule 9 became the first to gain actual human flight certification from NASA earlier this year with the successful completion of its final test mission, Demo-2, which flew to the ISS with two US astronauts aboard.
To get to this point, SpaceX had to successfully complete a series of milestones, including a fully automated unmanned ISS rendezvous mission and a demonstration of an emergency launch pad disruption safety system and post-launch for crew protection. During the Demo-1 mission, while all actual launch, docking and landing were handled by SpaceX's fully autonomous software and navigation, the astronauts also briefly assumed manual control to demonstrate that this human-piloted backup it would work as expected if needed.
So far, Crew-1 is proceeding as planned, with an image-perfect takeoff from Florida and a successful recovery of the first stage booster used on the Falcon 9 rocket used to launch Dragon. Crew Dragon's 'Resilience' also started from the second stage of Falcon 9 as planned just after 10 minutes after take-off, and there will be a 27-hour orbit journey before the Dragon meets the ISS for its docking, which is scheduled for Monday night around 11pm EST (8pm PST). Once fully docked, the astronauts will disembark and go to the station to begin their stay on active duty, which should last until next June.
Three of the four astronauts on this mission have been in space previously, but for pilot Victor Glover it is a first time. These four will join NASA's Kate Rubins and Roscosmos cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov on the station, bringing the total staff to seven (an increase from his usual six that NASA says will free up more time for astronauts to run experiments. , contrary to their duties related to the regular daily maintenance of the station).
This is the first time astronauts have launched into space on a regular NASA operational mission since the Shuttle program ended in 2011. It marks an official return of US human spaceflight capabilities and hopefully it should become the first in many human flight missions undertaken by SpaceX and Dragon - on both NASA flights and those organized by commercial customers.