WIKIARCHIVES.SPACE

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine and NASA Deputy Administrator Jim Morhard are seen on a monitor inside firing room four taking a selfie with NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley before they departed the Neil A. Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building for Launch Complex 39A to board a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft atop the company’s Falcon 9 rocket for NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission, Saturday, May 30, 2020, in the Launch Control Center at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission is the first launch with astronauts of the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 rocket to the International Space Station as part of the agency’s Commercial Crew Program. The test flight serves as an end-to-end demonstration of SpaceX’s crew transportation system. Behnken and Hurley launched at 3:22 p.m. EDT on Saturday, May 30, from Launch Complex 39A at the Kennedy Space Center. A new era of human spaceflight is set to begin as American astronauts once again launch on an American rocket from American soil to low-Earth orbit for the first time since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program in 2011.