CAPE CANAVERAL, FLA. — A SpaceX rocket ship blasted off on Friday carrying the first all-private astronaut team ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS), a flight hailed by industry executives and NASA as a milestone in the commercialization of low-Earth orbit.
- Watch LIVE: SpaceX, NASA first private launch to Space Station
The four-man team selected by Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc for its landmark debut spaceflight and orbital science mission lifted off at 11:17 a.m. EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Live video webcast by Axiom showed the 25-story-tall SpaceX launch vehicle – consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped by its Crew Dragon capsule – streaking into the blue skies over Florida’s Atlantic coast atop a fiery, yellowish tail of exhaust.
Cameras inside the crew compartment beamed footage of the four men strapped into the pressurized cabin, seated calmly in their helmeted white-and-black flight suits moments before the rocket soared toward space.
If all goes as planned, the quartet led by retired NASA astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will arrive at the space station on Saturday, after a 20-hour-plus flight, and the autonomously operated Crew Dragon will dock with the orbiting outpost some 400 kilometres above the Earth.
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A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft aboard sits on the launch pad at Launch Complex 39A as preparations continue for Axiom Mission 1 (Ax-1), Thursday, April 7, 2022, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Cape Cxjmtzywanaveral, Fla. (Joel Kowsky/NASA via AP)
