SpaceX ready to launch astronauts into space for the first time - Yahoo News

But Elon Musk's SpaceX defied expectations -- and on Wednesday hopes to make history by ferrying two NASA astronauts into space, the first crewed flight from US soil in nine long years.

The general public, in a nod to virus restrictions, has been told to watch via a livestream as Crew Dragon is launched by a Falcon 9 rocket toward the International Space Station.

He has ordered NASA to return to the moon in 2024, an unlikely timetable but one that has given the storied space agency a boost.

In the 22 years since the first components of the ISS were launched, only spacecraft developed by NASA and by the Russian space agency have carried crews there.

After, NASA astronauts learned Russian and travelled to the ISS in the Russian Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan, in a partnership which survived political tensions between Washington and Moscow.

At 4:33 pm (2033 GMT) on Wednesday, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket is set to take off from Launch Pad 39A with the Crew Dragon capsule at its top.

"There was huge skepticism," Hubbard, who met Musk before the creation of SpaceX and also chairs a SpaceX safety advisory panel, recalled.