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`Back in the game': SpaceX ship blasts off with 2 astronauts

`Back in the game': SpaceX ship blasts off with 2 astronauts

`Back in the game': SpaceX ship blasts off with 2 astronauts
May 30, 2020 1 min, 51 secs

Cape Canaveral | A rocket ship built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday (Sunday AEST), ushering in a new era in commercial space travel and putting the United States back in the business of launching astronauts into orbit from home soil for the first time in nearly a decade.

The two men are scheduled to arrive Sunday at the International Space Station, 400 kilometres above Earth, to join three crew members already there.

NASA officials and others held out hope the flight would lift American spirits and show the world what the US can do.

President Donald Trump, who came to Florida to watch, proclaimed: "Today we once again proudly launch American astronauts on American rockets, the best in the world, from right here on American soil." He vowed the US would be the first nation to land on Mars, promising a "future of American dominance in space".

With the liftoff, SpaceX became the first private company to launch people into orbit, a feat achieved previously by only three governments: the US, 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 US astronauts to and from the space station.

President Donald Trump views the SpaceX flight to the International Space Station, at Kennedy Space Centre. AP.

The astronauts set out for the launch pad in a gull-wing Tesla SUV after Behnken pantomimed a hug of his six-year-old son, Theo, and said: "Are you going to listen to mummy and make her life easy?" Hurley blew kisses to his 10-year-old son and wife.

Hurley piloted the shuttle on the last launch of astronauts from Kennedy, on July 8, 2011.

And at the flight control centre, the SpaceX controllers wore masks and were seated far apart.

The next SpaceX voyage to the space station, set for the end of August, will have a full, four-person crew: three Americans and one Japanese.

A rocket ship built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company thundered away from Earth with two Americans on Saturday, ushering in a new era in commercial space travel.

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