The historic moment for Elon Musk comes 18 years after he founded Space Exploration Technologies Corp. with the goal of populating other planets.
It is finally on. Elon Musk’s SpaceX launched three Americana and one Japanese astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday from Florida, marking NASA’s first full-fledged mission to send a crew into orbit via a privately owned spacecraft. The crew took off from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 7:27 pm in SpaceX’s newly designed Crew Dragon capsule. This is the second crew to be launched by SpaceX after a two-member crew returned from the orbiting lab three months ago. The crew is due to reach the space station on late Monday and will remain there until spring. The Crew Dragon capsule, named Resilience by its crew keeping in mind the challenging year especially due to the Covid-19, lifted off atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and reached orbit around nine minutes later. The Resilience capsule, which will stay at the International Space station until spring, has commander Mike Hopkins and two fellow NASA astronauts, mission pilot Victor Glover and physicist Shannon Walker.
