MAN: (ON RADIO) Ignition sequence start.
Six, five...
CALE: For more than half a century, Cape Canaveral in Florida
has been a place where history was made.
NEIL ARMSTRONG: That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
And on the weekend, people came here to the Kennedy Space Center
to see another first...
WOMAN: (ON RADIO) Three, two, one, zero.
Ignition. Lift-off!
There's the Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon.
Go, NASA! Go, SpaceX!
Godspeed, Bob and Doug!
..a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule carrying Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley
to the International Space Station,
and launching us into a brand-new era of space exploration.
Of course, it's not the first time people have gone into space,
so why is this mission so important?
MAN: (ON RADIO) All three engines up and burning.
Well, for starters, the United States hasn't launched
its own astronauts in nine years,
not since the last flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis.
The final lift-off of Atlantis.
On the shoulders of the Space Shuttle,
America will continue the dream.
NASA's shuttles were reusable aircraft
used to transport US astronauts into and out of space from 1981.
It had six of them, and over the years,
they were used to launch satellites,
do experiments and take astronauts to and from the ISS,
although two shuttles were lost
in tragic accidents.
NASA decided to retire its space shuttles in 2011
because they were expensive to run and it had other priorities,
like launching unmanned probes and planning a mission to Mars.
(MAN SPEAKS RUSSIAN OVER RADIO)
When US astronauts DID need a lift to space,
they had to buy a seat on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft,
but that's not cheap,
and apparently, it's not a very comfortable flight either.
Yikes!
So, in 2014, NASA asked some private companies
to find them a cheaper, home-grown alternative.
Enter Elon Musk.
(ROCK MUSIC PLAYS)
Yeah, you've probably heard of him.
The guy who founded PayPal and Tesla,
well, he is also the CEO of SpaceX,
a private space exploration company.
NASA paid SpaceX, and another company, Boeing,
to come up with a replacement for the Space Shuttle program.
Basically, NASA are buying tickets from SpaceX
to put their astronauts on board.
It's a big deal because it's the first time
NASA's asked a private company to build its spacecraft.
In fact, some reckon this is the future of space travel -
lots of private companies building rockets,
sending out satellites, and eventually lots of people.
MAN: (ON RADIO) Three, two, one, zero.
SpaceX has already launched rockets to the ISS...
..but this is the first crewed mission.
It was actually supposed to take off on Thursday,
but some bad weather got in the way.
MAN: (ON RADIO) Unfortunately, we are not going to launch today.
On Sunday, though, it was all systems go.
After 19 hours, the crew docked and entered
the International Space Station.
MAN: The hatch is open.
SpaceX is hoping that this mission
is a stepping stone towards even bigger things for the company,
and many say this is one small step for a different kind of space travel.