SpaceX successfully launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Nov. 15, the second time a private company has sent astronauts into space. (Photo: Jonathan Newton/NASA via AP)
By
Christian Davenport and
Hamza Shaban
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that camays after the company’s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.
SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.
With Sunday’s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry’s stalwarts and one of NASA’s most significant partners.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.
The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.
On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday’s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.
While the launch was successful, the crew still had a day-long journey to the space station. They are scheduled to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. ET Monday. Sunday’s flight put SpaceX’s Dragon on a trajectory to reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday. The spacecraft will then proceed slowly, using its onboard navigation, to autonomously park itself on one of the station’s ports, while whizzing around Earth in orbit at 17,500 mph.
“We’re not done yet. We need to keep going,” Kathy Lueders, the director of NASA’s human spaceflight directorate said during a news conference after the launch. “That spacecraft is out there with those precious crew members on them, and we’re going to get them to the International Space Station. ... Right now we’re not expecting any issues and I’m sure docking tomorrow we’ll go smoothly.”
The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.
Though heralded as a success that will open spaceflight to others, the road to this point was long and at times tortured. NASA first entrusted the private sector to fly cargo and supplies to the space station in 2008 under the George W. Bush administration, awarding contracts to SpaceX and then Orbital Sciences.
Allowing the private sector to fly missions was a controversial decision, and many critics at the time said it was unthinkable that NASA would allow the private sector to fly astronauts. But that changed under the Obama administration, which awarded “commercial crew program” contracts to SpaceX and Boeing, worth $6.8 billion combined, to build spacecraft capable of flying astronauts to the station.
Initially, both companies struggled to meet NASA’s rigorous standards for human spaceflight and suffered setbacks that delayed the program for years. SpaceX lost two of its Falcon 9 rockets in explosions, one during a cargo resupply mission, the other while being fueled on the launchpad. And one of its Crew Dragon spacecraft also blew up on a test stand.
No one was injured in any of those accidents, and the company pressed on, finding solutions to the problems while working alongside NASA to make adjustments as problems were detected. That included swapping out two engines on the Falcon 9 that flew Sunday after technicians discovered that some vent holes were clogged.
If the technical challenges weren’t enough, NASA and SpaceX were also warily eyeing Tropical Storm Eta’s erratic path across the Florida Keys, then up the Gulf of Mexico before shooting across the top of the Florida peninsula and jetting off east into the Atlantic. Rough seas in the area where the booster was to return to Earth forced the delay of the launch from Saturday until Sunday.
NASA also has been forced to take extra precautions to protect the astronauts and ground crews from the surging coronavirus pandemic, steps that were highlighted Friday when Musk, SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, announced that he had tested both positive and negative for the coronavirus. NASA regulations prohibit anyone with a positive test from being present for the launch, and Musk did not witness the launch from SpaceX’s control center at the Kennedy Space Center.
In the post-launch news conference, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who came here for the launch in his place, said that he "was tied in very closely with the launch. I have the texts to prove it. As usual, regardless of where he is on the planet, he’s is watching closely and providing guidance and support.”
Throughout it all, the astronauts remained upbeat and confident ahead of the launch. The crew arrived at the Kennedy Space Center about a week before the launch, waving and smiling.
“We are ready for this launch,” Hopkins said. “We are ready for the six months of work that is waiting for us on board the International Space Station. And we are ready for the return.”
Boeing, however, continues to have problems. Its Starliner spacecraft ran into trouble almost immediately after reaching orbit last December in a test flight with no astronauts on board.
A software problem made the flight computers think it was at a completely different point in the mission. Another software issue could have caused the service module to collide with the crew module, but that was caught in time, and controllers on the ground were able to beam up a fix. Still, the mission ended after just two days, and the spacecraft never docked with the space station, one of the primary objectives.
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