New Delhi: A SpaceX rocket ship carrying four civilians blasted off from Florida early Thursday in a first-of-its-kind mission to Earth orbit.
It was just before sunset, at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral when the four amateur astronauts, led by billionaire e-commerce executive Jared Isaacman, 38, lifted off at 8:03 pm (EDT), Wednesday.
The other three astronauts are Sian Proctor (51), Hayley Arceneaux (29), and Chris Sembroski (42).
A SpaceX webcast showed the four in their black-and-white flight suits with helmet displaying thumbs up, strapped into the pressurised cabin of Resilience, the Crew Dragon capsule perched atop a Falcon 9 rocket.
Fitted with a special observation dome instead of the usual docking hatch, the Crew Dragon reached orbit around 10 minutes after the blast-off for a three-day mission, Reuters reported.
After separating from the spacecraft's top half, the first-stage booster of the rocket returned to Earth safely touching down on a landing platform floating in the Atlantic on a drone ship, the report said.
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'The door is open now'
As the spacecraft climbed to nearly 125 miles (200 km) above Earth, Isaacman read a statement in which he thanked everyone who made it possible to create this history.
He called it a journey "right to the doorstep of an exciting and unexplored frontier, where few have come before and many are about to follow".
"The door is open now, and it's pretty incredible," he said, as quoted in the Reuters report.
At 6.20 am (IST), SpaceX said in a tweet that the spacecraft was “officially in space”.
“Dragon and the @inspiration4x astronauts are now officially in space! Dragon will conduct two phasing burns to reach its cruising orbit of 575km where the crew will spend the next three days orbiting planet Earth”
In one of the subsequent tweets, SpaceX posted that Dragon had created an altitude record.
“Second phasing burn complete. Dragon and the @inspiration4x crew have reached a circular orbit of 585km – a new Dragon altitude record.”
The first crewed mission to orbit with no professional astronauts marked the debut flight of SpaceX founder and owner Elon Musk's new orbital tourism business.