The launch of the first all-private crew to the International Space Station was hailed by industry executives as a milestone in the commercialisation of spaceflight.
The team of four selected by Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc for its debut spaceflight and orbital science mission lifted off on Friday morning from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The live video showed the 25-storey SpaceX launch vehicle, consisting of a two-stage Falcon 9 rocket topped by its Crew Dragon capsule, streaking into the blue skies over Florida's Atlantic coast.
The four men were strapped into the pressurised cabin and seated calmly in their flight suits as the rocket soared toward space.
Nine minutes after launch, the rocket's upper stage delivered the crew capsule into its preliminary orbit, according to launch commentators. The rocket's lower stage flew back to Earth and landed on a platform floating in the Atlantic.
Kate Tice described the liftoff as perfect. A crew member could be heard telling mission control that it was a hell of a ride.
The crew of the Crew Dragon will dock with the International Space Station on Saturday after a 20-hour flight, which will be led by Michael Lopez-Alegria.
The flight was being directed from the headquarters of the company.
Once the astronauts are on the space station, they will assume responsibility for the science and research that will take place there.
The mission, which is a partnership between three space companies, has been described as a major step in the expansion of commercial space ventures.
Bill Nelson, the Nasa chief, said before the flight that they were taking commercial business off the face of the Earth and putting it up in space. The agency was able to focus more on sending humans to the moon, Mars, and other deep space exploration because of the shift.
Friday's launch is the sixth human space flight by the company in the last two years, following four Nasa missions to the space station and theInspiration 4 launch in September. The flight didn't dock with the space station.
The first all-commercial team of astronauts will use the space station for its intended purpose as a research laboratory when they fly on the Ax-1 mission.
Three American astronauts, a German and three Russian cosmonauts will be sharing a weightless work environment with the Axiom team.
The company's vice-president for business development is Lopez-Alegria. The mission pilot is Larry Connor, a real estate and technology entrepreneur from Ohio. The company did not give a precise age forConnor, who is in his 70s.
A former Israeli fighter pilot and a Canadian businessman are part of the team. Ilan Ramon, who perished with six Nasa crewmates in the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster, was the second Israeli in space.
Many of the wealthy passengers taking suborbital rides on Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic are members of the crew of the Axiom.
Each crew member was trained for hundreds of hours by both Nasa and SpaceX as part of the mission.
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A technology demonstration to produce optics using the surface tension of fluids in microgravity is one of the many science experiments the team will conduct.
Since 2000, the space station has been occupied by a US-Russian-led partnership that includes Canada, Japan, and 11 European countries.
After the International Space Station is retired, no new space station will be built by Nasa. A new commercial wing was selected by Nasa in 2020 to be built to the space station, which is currently the length of a football field.
When the rest of the station is ready to be dismantled, the Axiom modules will be removed. Private operators are expected to put their stations in space once the International Space Station is out of service.
Over the next two years, the company will fly three more private astronauts to the space station.
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