Crew Dragon Carries Astronauts to the Space Station

On May 30, 2020, NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken launched from Kennedy Space Center aboard the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour, carried by a Falcon 9 rocket. The mission, officially designated Crew Dragon Demo-2, represented the first crewed orbital flight departing from American territory since the conclusion of the Space Shuttle program in 2011. It was also the first time a commercially built and operated American spacecraft carried astronauts into orbit.

Following the retirement of the space shuttles, NASA lacked an indigenous system for human orbital transport. The agency relied on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to transport crews to the International Space Station, with the price per seat climbing to about 86 million dollars under the most recent contracts. To address this reliance and reduce long-term transportation costs, NASA initiated the Commercial Crew Program. In 2014, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth about 2.6 billion dollars to complete development of Crew Dragon and fly at least six operational missions, while Boeing received a similar deal worth 4.2 billion dollars for its Starliner capsule.