SpaceX releases two astronauts in space for historic travel

Release of astronauts, Marine Colonel Doug Hurley and Air Force Colonel Bob Behken, ends a nine-year-old NASA pause.

The rocket of the private SpaceX company, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, was launched from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida and the trip to the International Space Station lasts 19 hours.

For Elon Musk, Saturday's event marks another historic moment for multi-use rockets by the California Handhorn company, which makes space flight less costly and more frequent. This also marks the first time that a private developed and operated space tool, not NASA, sends Americans into orbit around the Earth.

ASTRONATIONS

When the Atlantis Space Ship was launched for the last time by Cape Canaveral on July 8, 2011, it was run by astronaut NASA's Doug Hurley.

Now nearly a decade later, Hurley is one of the two test pilots for the entire new SpaceX missile ship produced for this flight.

NASA astronauts, retired Marine Colonel Doug Hurley and Air Force Colonel Bob Behken are classmates, friends, space exploration veterans, married to space veterans and have both young men.

They use the same launch platform where Atlantis shut down the launch programme in 2011, their country's last year for NASA astronauts.

Nine years and a half, nine years later, we see not only that we are ready to fly the first vehicle with the crew to the Space Station, but we also have the excitement that we might return to the moon in a few years. After we landed the Atlantis ship in 2011, we would never have thought we were here nine years later. It's much better than I imagined”, Hurley says.

Since then, the only way to get to the space station for astronauts has been with Russian missiles released by Kazakhstan.

Hurley will lead the launch and landing, an appropriate task for the pilot of NASA's last space shuttle flight.

Behken, a six-walk mechanical engineer in space in his biography, will oversee contact and landing at the International Space Station (ISS).

Hurley, 53, and Behken, 49, are NASA's first pilot crew in decades.

Hurley and Behnne were married to NASA astronaut colleagues: Karen Neyberg and Megan McArthur. Each couple have a son at the age of ten and six.

Although the Dragon crew's capsule and its rescue system have already been demonstrated in manecine flights, there are no guarantees. On space flight, there never is.

I think there are so many technical factors and things that we need to focus on to make sure that we succeed, for our country in history, or even trying to put our names in the same sentences as the people that were ahead of us. It seems premature until we have made it”, says Behken.

Their flight marks the return of astronauts from the United States as well as the first of its kind from a private company.