Launch will provide vital data on whether the spacecraft is ready to carry passengers
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft took off on Saturday morning, marking the first major step towards US ambitions to resume sending astronauts into space on its own spacecraft on American soil.in Florida at 2.49am local time as planned, on top of a Falcon 9 rocket, carrying a dummy pilot called Ripley — a nod to Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien movies — loaded with sensors to feed back information on the journey’s progress.
The American space agency ended its own Space Shuttle in 2011, opting for a new commercial crew programme working with Elon Musk’s SpaceX andSince then, it has relied on Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft to blast astronauts into space, which costs $81 million dollars a seat. Crew Dragon’s lift off has been hit by several delays along the way, previously scheduled for January 7th, before moving to January 17th and then pushing it back again to no earlier than February.
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