SpaceX Aces Historic Launch Of The Crew Dragon Astronaut Pod

As expected, the experienced SpaceX stuck the landing, with the Falcon 9 booster flawlessly touching down on the company's "Of Course I Still Love You" droneship, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean. After today, the private space company now boasts 53 successful landings of its rocket boosters.

"Crew Dragon will carry out a series of phasing maneuvers as it pursues the space station during approach," stated NASA officials.

The spacecraft is slated to remain at the ISS for a period of five days and will head back home in the early hours of Friday morning, undocking with the space station at approximately 2:30 a.m. EST. After a six-hour spaceflight, the Crew Dragon will parachute down to Earth, splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean sometime around 8:45 a.m. EST.

While the capsule was, in fact, unmanned, the Crew Dragon didn't fly its first mission alone. The astronaut pod was occupied by an "anthropomorphic test dummy" (ATD) called Ripley and his trusted companion, a plushie Earth-shaped ball described by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as a "super high tech zero-g indicator."

While Ripley was busy gathering data for the safety of future astronauts bound to ride the Dragon into space, his companion did a bang-up job at demonstrating zero gravity. A short post-launch clip shared to Twitter by Elon Musk showed the plushie gracefully floating inside the Crew Dragon capsule.

Photos from the launch posted by NASA on its Flickr account showed Behnken and Hurley passionately watching the launch of DM-1. The astronauts were later photographed having a friendly chat with Musk, the Crew Dragon chief designer, after the blast-off.

The two astronauts are slated to fly the Dragon to the ISS during the capsule's first manned test flight, Demo-2 or DM-2, which is currently targeted for July. By doing so, Behnken and Hurley will become the first American astronauts to launch into space from U.S. soil since 2011.

According to NASA officials, today's launch "marks a significant step toward returning to the nation the capability to launch astronauts on a U.S.-built spacecraft from U.S. soil." In the past eight years, the space agency has had to rely on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to taxi its astronauts to work on board the ISS.

"What today really represents is a new era in spaceflight," NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said after the launch. "We're looking forward to being one of many customers in a robust commercial marketplace in low-Earth orbit."

Earlier today, Bridenstine took to Twitter to congratulate the SpaceX and NASA teams for the success of this first-of-its-kind mission.

"We're only partway through the mission, but the system thus far has passed an exhaustive set of reviews, and the launch itself. The launch went as expected and, so far, everything is nominal."