Two veteran NASA astronauts rocketed away from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida
on Saturday May 30, 2020 to begin a test flight of a new commercial spaceship
designed, built and owned by SpaceX.
The long-awaited return of human spaceflight to the Florida spaceport
marked just the fifth time in U.S. history that astronauts flew into orbit o
n a new type of spacecraft, and the first time since the inaugural space shuttle launch in 1981.
With spacecraft commander Doug Hurley in the left seat and
veteran astronaut Bob Behnken to his right, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft
lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center at 3:22:45 p.m. EDT (1922:45 GMT) Saturday.
Nine minutes later, the astronauts were in orbit, ending a nearly decade-long gap
in U.S. human spaceflight capability that forced NASA to pay the Russian space
agency for rides to the space station on Soyuz spaceships.
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