Human space flight
Flying people to the Space Station will be SpaceX’s biggest deal yet

It ought also to end NASA’s old way of commissioning hardware

NASA

IT WAS ONE of those neat bits of symmetry that history seems to enjoy. On May 30th, at 15.22 local time, Douglas Hurley, an American astronaut, blasted off from the Kennedy Space Centre at Cape Canaveral, Florida, on his way to the International Space Station (ISS). The last time Colonel Hurley went into space was in 2011. On that occasion he was the pilot of the 135th—and final—Space Shuttle mission. Since that mission’s craft, Atlantis, returned to Earth, America had lacked the capacity to launch its own astronauts into space.

Colonel Hurley’s lift-off raises the curtain on a new era. His ride to the ISS, which he shared with another former Shuttle crew member, Robert Behnken, is in a Dragon space capsule made by SpaceX, a firm founded in 2002 by Elon Musk. It was propelled into orbit at the second attempt (the first, scheduled for May 27th, was called off because of bad weather) by a Falcon 9 rocket built by the same firm. The drama is not quite over, for the capsule must still dock with the space station 19 hours after its launch—a tricky manoeuvre that might yet go wrong. But with the astronauts delivered safely to orbit, the most dangerous part of the journey before re-entry has been accomplished. Once the capsule has reached the ISS it will remain docked for between one and four months before returning to Earth with Colonel Hurley and Colonel Behnken aboard. Assuming all goes off without a hitch, this flight will be the biggest feather yet to grace SpaceX’s well-festooned cap.