CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A rocket ship built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans aboard Saturday, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the United States back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from U.S. soil for the first time in nearly a decade.
NASA's Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken rode skyward aboard a white-and-black, bullet-shaped Dragon capsule on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, lifting off at 2:22 p.m. from the same launchpad used to send Apollo crews to the moon a half-century ago. Minutes later, they slipped safely into orbit.
"Let's light this candle," Hurley said just before ignition, borrowing the words used by Alan Shepard on America's first human spaceflight, in 1961.
The two men are scheduled to arrive today at the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth, to join three crew members already there. After a stay of up to four months, they will come home with a Right Stuff-style splashdown at sea, something the world hasn't witnessed since the 1970s.
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Today's docking will be handled autonomously by the spacecraft, though Hurley and Behnken have the ability to take over the controls manually if needed.
The mission unfolded amid the gloom of the coronavirus outbreak, which has killed more than 103,000 Americans, and racial unrest across the U.S. over the death of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man, at the hands of Minneapolis police. NASA officials and others held out hope the flight would lift American spirits and show the world what the U.S. can do.
Doug Marshburn of Deltona, Fla., shouted: "USA! USA!" as he watched the 260-foot rocket climb skyward.
"I'm very proud of the United States. We are back in the game. It's very satisfying," he said.
Both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, chairman of the National Space Council, were in attendance to mark a new era of spaceflight.
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SpaceX became the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments -- the U.S., Russia and China.
The flight also ended a nine-year launch drought for NASA. Ever since it retired the space shuttle in 2011, NASA has relied on Russian spaceships launched from Kazakhstan to take U.S. astronauts to and from the space station.
In the intervening years, 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.
NASA hopes to rely in part on commercial partners as it pursues it next goals: sending astronauts back to the moon in the next few years, and on to Mars in the 2030s.
TRUMP, PENCE ON HAND
Musk, the visionary behind the Tesla electric car company, issued a statement in which he called the launch "a dream come true."
At a rally held a short time later at NASA's 525-foot-high Vehicle Assembly Building, Pence commended Musk for a "job well done."
Pence said that as the nation deals with the coronavirus and racial strife, "I believe with all my heart that millions of Americans today will find the same inspiration and unity of purpose that we found in those days in the 1960s" during Apollo.
And Trump proclaimed: "Today, we once again proudly launch American astronauts on American rockets, the best in the world, from right here on American soil."
The president also addressed the unrest surrounding Floyd's death during a speech celebrating the launch, saying Floyd's death was a "grave tragedy" that has filled the country with anger and grief. But he said his administration would stop mob violence, "and we'll stop it cold."
"I stand before you as a friend and ally to every American seeking justice and peace, and I stand before you in firm opposition to anyone exploiting this tragedy to loot, rob, attack and menace," he said. "Healing, not hatred, justice, not chaos, are the missions at hand."
Trump had flown to the Kennedy Space Center on Wednesday before the launch was postponed at the last minute because of bad weather.
"When you hear that sound and you hear all of that roar, you can imagine how dangerous it is," Trump said. "When you feel the shake -- and we're very far away -- but when you feel the shake over here, it's pretty amazing. Beautiful sight. A beautiful ship, too."
Asked why he felt it was important to be in Florida for the launch, given all that is going on in the country, Trump said the launch was a "great inspiration" for the country.
"We suffered something that was terrible, it should have never happened. And that's one of the reasons I wanted to be here today. I thought it was so important to be here today," Trump said. "And I think any one of you would say, that was an inspiration to see what we just saw."
Trump visited the launch control center to congratulate those involved and spoke with Musk, who wore a shirt emblazoned with the launch's logo.
Under Trump, NASA has provided companies with research and development funds to help build their own spacecraft.
EVERYONE CELEBRATES
The astronauts set out for the launchpad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV after Behnken pantomimed a hug of his 6-year-old son, Theo, and said: "Are you going to listen to Mommy and make her life easy?" Hurley blew kisses to his 10-year-old son and wife.
Nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first-stage booster landed, as designed, on a barge a few hundred miles off the Florida coast, to be reused on another flight.
"Thanks for the great ride to space," Hurley told SpaceX ground control. His crewmate batted around a sparkly purplish toy, demonstrating that they had reached zero gravity.
SpaceX controllers at Hawthorne, Calif., cheered and applauded wildly.
NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine declared: "This is everything that America has to offer in its purest form."
"It's been nine years since we've launched American astronauts on American rockets from American soil -- and now it's done. We have done it. It's been way too long," he said.
Attendance inside Kennedy Space Center was strictly limited because of the coronavirus, and the crowd amounted to only a few thousand. By NASA's count, more than 3 million viewers tuned in online.
Despite NASA's insistence that the public stay safe by staying home, spectators gathered along beaches and roads hours in advance.
Among them was Neil Wight, a machinist from Buffalo, N.Y., who staked out a view of the launchpad from a park in Titusville, Fla.
"With everything that's going on in this country right now, it's important that we do things extraordinary in life," Wight said.
"We've been bombarded with doom and gloom for the last six, eight weeks, whatever it is, and this is awesome. It brings a lot of people together."
Because of the coronavirus, the astronauts were kept in quasi-quarantine for more than two months. The SpaceX technicians who helped them get into their spacesuits wore masks and gloves. And at the launch center, the SpaceX controllers wore masks and were seated far apart.
Hurley, a 53-year-old retired Marine, and Behnken, 49, an Air Force colonel, are veterans of two space shuttle flights each. Hurley piloted the shuttle on the last launch of astronauts from Kennedy, on July 8, 2011.
In keeping with Musk's penchant for futuristic flash, the astronauts wore angular white uniforms with black trim. Instead of the usual multitude of dials, knobs and switches, the Dragon capsule has three large touchscreens.
A VICTORY FOR SPACEX
For SpaceX, it was the climax of an improbable odyssey that began in 2002 when Musk founded a space company with the goal of traveling to Mars.
SpaceX has been launching cargo capsules to the space station since 2012. In preparation for Saturday's flight, SpaceX sent up a Dragon capsule with only a test dummy aboard last year, and it docked smoothly at the orbiting outpost on autopilot, then returned to Earth in a splashdown.
Under the new, 21st-century corporate-public partnership, aerospace companies design, build, own and operate the spaceships, and NASA is essentially a paying customer on a list that could eventually include nongovernment researchers, artists and tourists. Actor Tom Cruise has already expressed interest.
Saturday's mission is technically considered by SpaceX and NASA to be a test flight. The next SpaceX voyage to the space station, set for late August, will have a full, four-person crew -- three Americans and one Japanese.
The first flight was originally targeted for around 2015. But the project encountered bureaucratic delays and technical setbacks. A SpaceX capsule exploded on the test stand last year. Boeing's first Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit and was nearly destroyed during a test flight in December.
For SpaceX -- and the future of public-corporate space exploration -- the stakes were extraordinarily high, and Musk said he would take responsibility if anything went wrong. Just before liftoff, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said she was "super-nervous -- stomach in throat."
Information for this article was contributed by Marcia Dunn, Jill Colvin, Mike Schneider and Kevin Freking of The Associated Press; and by Jacob Bogage and Christian Davenport of The Washington Post.
A Section on 05/31/2020