SpaceX launch ‘new era’ in exploration: NASA
Posted May 22, 2012 8:58 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
An unmanned 54-metre (178-foot) tall Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Tuesday for a mission designed to be the first commercial flight to the International Space Station.
Less than 10 minutes later, the rocket owned by privately held Space Exploration Technologies, delivered its cargo – a Dragon capsule with 544 kg (1,200 pounds) of supplies for the station crew – into orbit.
Everything is looking really good and I think I would really count today as a success no matter what happens the rest of the mission,” company founder and chief executive Elon Musk said in a news conference after the rocket launch.
NASA is counting on companies like Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to take over the task of flying cargo – and eventually astronauts – to the $100 billion space station, which orbits about 240 miles above Earth.
Currently, NASA is dependent on Russia to fly crew to the station, at a cost of more than $60 million per person.
Russia, Europe and Japan also fly cargo to the station.
“Today marks the beginning of a new era in exploration. A future in space that would create good paying jobs here on the Florida coast as well as throughout the United States of America.
“The significance of this day cannot be overstated; a private company has launched a spacecraft to the International Space Station that will attempt to dock there for the first time. And while there is a lot of work ahead to successfully complete this mission, we are certainly off to good start and I hope you all would agree on that,” NASA administrator Charles Bolden told reporters in a separate news briefing after the launch.
If its test flight is successful, SpaceX would become the first private company to reach the space station, a microgravity research complex for biological, materials, fluid physics and other science experiments and technology demonstrations.
SpaceX and a second company, Orbital Sciences Corp, already hold contracts worth a combined $3.5 billion to fly cargo to the station.
