The first US National Aeronautics and Space Administration- (Nasa-) certified regular commercial crewed spaceflight successfully launched in the early hours of Monday, South African time. The flight is being undertaken by private-sector enterprise SpaceX on behalf of Nasa, using the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX was founded and is led by South African-born engineer and entrepreneur Elon Musk. Crew Dragon is just the latest in a long line of spaceflight successes achieved by his company.

Known as the Crew-1 mission (the previous Crew Dragon flight, earlier this year, was a demonstration mission which preceded and was an essential requirement for the certification of the space craft), the spacecraft lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at Nasa’s Kennedy Space Flight Centre at Cape Canaveral in the US State of Florida. Given the individual name “Resilience”, the spacecraft is carrying three US and one Japanese astronauts, namely Michael Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker and Soichi Noguchi, to the International Space Station (ISS).

“Nasa is delivering on its commitment to the American people and our international partners to provide safe, reliable, and cost-effective missions to the International Space Station using American private industry,” affirmed Nasa administrator Jim Bridenstine. “This is an important mission for Nasa, SpaceX and our partners at JAXA [Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency], and we look forward to watching this crew arrive at [the ISS] to carry on our partnership for all of humanity.”

“I could not be more proud of the work we’ve done here today,” highlighted SpaceX president and COO Gwynne Shotwell. “Falcon 9 looked great, [Crew] Dragon was dropped off into a beautiful orbit about 12 minutes into the mission, and we’ll get more data as we go.”

“It is an honour to have our Japanese astronaut launch on this Crew-1 Dragon as the first astronaut of the [sic] International Partner participating in the ISS programme,” emphasised JAXA VP Hiroshi Sasaki. “We look forward to having him conduct lots of science and demonstrate the technology, for here on Earth and for the future. I would also like to thank Nasa and SpaceX for their tremendous effort to make this happen.” 

During its flight, the “Resilience” is controlled from SpaceX’s own mission control centre in Hawthorne in the State of California, monitored by Nasa’s own famed mission control centre at the Johnson Space Centre in Houston, in the State of Texas. The spacecraft is scheduled to autonomously dock with the ISS on Tuesday morning South African time. 

The flight is also historic because the crew it is carrying will increase the long-term complement of the ISS from the current six to seven (originally, ISS crews numbered only three). This will increase the amount of research that it will be possible to do on the station.