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SpaceX is the first private company to complete manned space flight

SpaceX has successfully completed the first commercial manned space flight ever. Elon Musk’s company thus registers the history books.

The Crew Dragon capsule departed late May through the Falcon-9 launch vehicle from NASA’s Cape Canaveral launch site in Florida. The destination of the test flight was the International Space Station (ISS) where the two crew members, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, stayed for two months. On Sunday evening, the capsule returned to Earth and landed with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico after a flawless flight. The landing was the first at sea after the Apollo program was finally discontinued 45 years ago.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was rushed over from the SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne to Houston to personally greet the two astronauts who completed the mission. “I’m not a believer, but I said a prayer for this,” said a seemingly moved Musk at the news conference afterwards.

Multiplanetair

It is a milestone in the history of space travel that a private company successfully completes a return trip to ISS. The gates to commercialization of space travel thus appear to be definitively open. Until now, only national governments have built capsules and manned space flights, but in a few years, several private companies should be able to organize space flights.

“We are entering a new era of human space travel,” said NASA boss Jim Bridenstine. Although it took 18 years for SpaceX to fly people back and forth to the ISS, Musk expressed the ambition to be on Mars and the moon in considerable time to make humanity “multiplanetary.” A new Crew Dragon mission to the ISS is planned for September.

Boeing

The Crew Dragon test flight is part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). With this, NASA wants to set up a market in the space sector in which companies can compete on price, quality and safety. The space agency therefore outsourced the construction of capsules to SpaceX and Boeing in 2014.

Boeing fired the main bird and received 4.2 billion for the construction of the Starliner, while SpaceX had to make a 2.6 billion side contract for its Crew Dragon. However, Boeing is a lot less than SpaceX and saw an unmanned test flight fail at the end of last year.

In 2011, the Americans pulled the plug on the space shuttle program for safety reasons. Since then, they no longer carried out autonomous space flights and appealed to the Russians’ Soyuz capsule. Now that an American company has successfully completed a manned flight to the ISS, the country can return to space on its own.

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