SpaceX rocket launches first all-private astronaut team in milestone flight to space station

A SpaceX rocket ship blasted off on Friday carrying the first all-private astronaut team ever launched to the International Space Station (ISS), a flight hailed by industry executives and Nasa as a milestone in the commercialisation of low-Earth orbit.

The four-man team selected by Houston-based startup Axiom Space Inc for its landmark debut spaceflight and orbital science mission lifted off at 11.17 am Eastern Time from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Centre in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Live video webcast by Axiom showed the 25-story-tall 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 atop a fiery, yellowish tail of exhaust.

Cameras inside the crew compartment beamed footage of the four men strapped into the pressurised cabin, seated calmly in their helmeted white-and-black flight suits moments before the rocket soared toward space.

If all goes as planned, the quartet led by retired Nasa astronaut Michael Lopez-Alegria will arrive at the space station on Saturday, after a 20-hour-plus flight, and the autonomously operated Crew Dragon will dock with the orbiting outpost some 400km (250 miles) above the Earth.

Nasa, besides furnishing the launch site, assumes responsibility for the astronauts once they rendezvous with the space station to undertake eight days of science and biomedical research.

The mission, representing a partnership among Axiom, SpaceX and Nasa, is touted by all three as a major step in the latest expansion of commercial space ventures collectively referred to by insiders as the low-Earth orbit economy, or “LEO economy” for short.