U.S. Launches Astronauts Again, Ushering In Commercial Space Era

By Stefan J. Bos, Special Correspondent Worthy News

(Worthy News) – The United States has ushered in a new era of commercial human space travel as a rocket ship built by entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on board.

Saturday’s successful launch put America’s NASA space agency back in business nearly a decade after launching its last human mission from American soil.

NASA’s Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a sleek, white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule. It was connected on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off from the same launch pad used to send the Apollo astronauts to the moon a half-century ago.

They were traveling with roughly 27,000 kilometers (16,777 miles) per hour to the international space station, sending spectacular footage of earth along the way.

The ride of the two middle-aged men, who are both married to fellow NASA astronauts, came nine long years after the retirement of space shuttles in 2011. In the years since NASA paid Russia’s space program to transport its astronauts to the space station.

With Saturday’s success, NASA has begun ceding this task to entrepreneurs such as SpaceX founder Musk, who has a dream of sending colonists to Mars.

NASA outsourced the job of designing and building its next generation of spaceships to SpaceX and Boeing, awarding them $7 billion in contracts in a public-private partnership aimed at driving down costs and spurring innovation. Boeing’s spaceship, the Starliner capsule, is not expected to fly astronauts until early 2021.

The launch also gave hope to a nation still battling with the economic and social aftermath of the coronavirus outbreak amid political strife. Millions, many even in virus quarantine, watched online or on television as the rocket slowly first but later shot like a sleek, silvery javelin into cloudy, humid skies.

Among those watching was U.S. President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who returned to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida after Wednesday’s launch was called off at the last moment due to bad weather.

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