SpaceX rocket ship blasts off on historic flight

CAPE CANAVERAL: A rocket ship built by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a brand new era in commercial space travel and putting the United States back into the company of launching astronauts into orbit out of U.S. land for the very first time in almost a decade.NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of some Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 3:22 p.m. from precisely the exact same launch pad used to send Apollo crews to the moon that a half-century past. Minutes later, they slid securely into orbit. “Let’s light this candle,” Hurley said before ignition, calculating the words employed by Alan Shepard on America’s first human spaceflight, in 1961. Both men are scheduled to reach the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, on Sunday to combine the three crew members already there. After a stay of up to four weeks, they will come home with a Right Stuff-style splashdown in sea. The assignment unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has murdered over 100,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black guy, in the control of Minneapolis authorities. NASA officials and many others hope that the flight could would be lift American spirits. “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 stated before launch.First private companyDoug Marshburn of Deltona, Florida, cried:”USA! USA! ” as the 260-foot rocket climbed skyward. “I’m very proud of the United States. We are back in the game. It’s very satisfying,” he said.With the on-time liftoff, SpaceX became the first private company to launch people into orbit, and a feat achieved previously by just three governments: the U.S., Russia and China.The flight even ended a nine-year launch burial for NASA. Ever since it retired at the space shuttle from 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships started from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the distance station.In the intervening years, NASA declared the job of designing and constructing its second generation of spaceships into SpaceX along with Boeing, awarding them $7 billion in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down prices and spurring innovation. Boeing’s spaceship, the Starliner capsule, isn’t expected to fly astronauts till ancient 2021. NASA expects to rely on part on commercial spouses as it pursues it aims: sending astronauts back to the moon in the next few decades, and on to Mars from the 2030s. ‘Great ride to space’Musk, the visionary also behind the Tesla electric car company, had no immediate comment on the successful liftoff.A launch attempt on Wednesday was called off with less than 17 minutes to go in the countdown because of lightning. On Saturday, stormy weather threatened another postponement for most of the day, but then the skies began to clear just in the time.The astronauts set out for the launch pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV after 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.Nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket’s first-stage booster landed, as designed, on a barge a few hundred miles off the Florida coast, to be reused on another flight. “Thanks for the terrific ride to distance,” Hurley told SpaceX ground control. His crewmate batted around a sparkly purplish toy, demonstrating that they had reached zero gravity.SpaceX controllers at Hawthorne, California, cheered and applauded wildly. Bridenstine declared:”This is everything that America has to offer in its purest form” “It’s been years since we have started American astronauts on American rockets from American land _ and today it is done. It has been done by us. It’s been far too long,” he said.President Donald Trump, who came to Florida to watch along with Vice President Mike Pence, said:”I’m so proud of the people at NASA, most of the people who worked collectively, private and public. When you find a sight like this it is incredible.” Attendance inside Kennedy Space Center was strictly limited because of the coronavirus, and the crowd amounted to only a few thousand. By NASA’s count, over 3 million viewers tuned in online.Despite NASA’s insistence that the public stay safe by staying home, spectators gathered along beaches and roads hours in advance.Among them was Neil Wight, a machinist from Buffalo, New York, who staked out a view of the launch pad from a park in Titusville. “It’s fairly historically significant in my novel, and lots of different people’s publications. With everything that is happening in this country at the moment, it is important that we do matters exceptional in life,” Wight said. “We’ve been bombarded with doom and gloom for the previous six, eight months, so it is, which is awesome. It attracts a lot of people ” Crew were in quasi quarantineBecause of the coronavirus, the astronauts were kept in quasi-quarantine for more than two months. The SpaceX technicians who helped them get into their spacesuits wore masks and gloves that made them look like black-clad ninjas. And at the launch center, the SpaceX controllers wore masks and were seated far apart.Hurley, a 53-year-old retired Marine, and Behnken, 49, an Air Force colonel, are veterans of two space shuttle flights each. Hurley piloted the shuttle on the last launch of astronauts from Kennedy, on July 8, 2011. In keeping with Musk’s penchant for futuristic flash, the astronauts wore angular white uniforms with black trim. Instead of the usual multitude of dials, knobs and switches, the Dragon capsule has three large touchscreens.SpaceX has been launching cargo capsules to the space station since 2012. In preparation for Saturday’s flight, SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with only a test dummy aboard last year, and it docked smoothly at the orbiting outpost on autopilot, then returned to Earth in a splashdown.During the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and shuttle programs, NASA relied on aerospace contractors to build spacecraft according to the agency’s designs. NASA owned and operated the ships. ‘Suoer nervous’Under the new, 21st-century partnership, aerospace companies design, build, own and operate the spaceships, and NASA is essentially a paying customer on a list that could eventually include non-government researchers, artists and tourists. (Tom Cruise has already expressed interest.) “What Elon Musk has performed for the American space program is he’s brought vision and inspiration which we had not had” since the shuttle’s retirement, Bridenstine said.The mission is technically considered by SpaceX and NASA to be a test flight. The next SpaceX voyage to the space station, set for the end of August, will have a full, four-person crew: three Americans and one Japanese.Saturday’s first human flight was originally targeted for around 2015. But the project encountered bureaucratic delays and technical setbacks. A SpaceX capsule exploded on the test stand last year. Boeing’s first Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit during an crew-less test flight in December and was nearly destroyed at the mission’s end.For SpaceX – and the future of public-corporate space exploration – the stakes were extraordinarily high, and Musk said he would take responsibility if anything went wrong.Just before liftoff, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said she was”super nervous, tummy in throat”

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