There were no people on this demonstration flight, a SpaceX vehicle called Crew Dragon. As lightning sparked in distant skies, the spacecraft lifted off at the appointed time, 2:49 a.m. ET, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Flight Center in Florida. Within 10 minutes the capsule was in orbit, headed toward a Sunday morning rendezvous with the International Space Station.
“Tonight was a big night for the United States of America, a great night for NASA,” Jim Bridenstine, the NASA administrator, said during a news conference.
The launch was also an important step for the goals of Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX in 2002 and who says the objective of the company is to send people to space and eventually Mars.
To date, the company has sent into space only satellites and cargo (and one Tesla sports car). “We still haven’t launched anyone yet, but hopefully, we will later this year,” Musk said. “So that would definitely be a culmination of a long dream for a lot of people, me and a lot of people at SpaceX.”
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For the past eight years, NASA has been paying for rides on Russian spacecraft to get its astronauts to and from the International Space Station. Instead of developing and operating its own replacement for the space shuttles, NASA has instead turned to private companies to provide that service. In 2014, the space agency awarded two contracts, to SpaceX and to Boeing.
The mission that launched Saturday, known as Demo-1, is an end-to-end test of the spacecraft from launch to docking at the International Space Station to re-entering over the United States and splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.
The capsule is to arrive at the space station on Sunday, about 27 hours after launch.
After five days at the station, it is scheduled to leave on March 8.
For this demonstration flight, one of the seats is occupied with a sort of artificial person — what NASA calls an ATD or “anthropomorphic test device” — which is wearing a SpaceX spacesuit. The device includes sensors to measure forces and accelerations that a person would experience on the trip.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.