The nine-minute flight ended with the Dragon crew capsule parachuting safely into the Atlantic, after separating and speeding away from the exploding rocket.
"I'm super fired up," Elon Musk, the company's founder and chief executive, told reporters. "It's just going to be wonderful to get astronauts back into orbit from American soil after almost a decade of not being able to do so. That's just super exciting."NASA astronauts have not launched from the US since the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
Recycled from three previous launches, the SpaceX rocket was destroyed as it burst apart in flight and slammed in pieces into the sea. SpaceX normally tries to recover its boosters to drive down launch costs, landing them upright on a floating platform or back at the launch site. "We'll see what the data show and go from there," Hurley said. "But it certainly is a confidence builder from the standpoint if you ever got into that situation, that Dragon can get us away from the booster quickly."
NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing a decade ago to transport astronauts to and from the space station for billions of dollars. Both companies struggled with technical problems, adding years of delay and forcing NASA to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars extra for Russian rocket rides. Lueders said it's too soon to know whether Boeing will need to send another Starliner to the space station without a crew or go straight to launching astronauts later this year. An investigation team is still looking into why the Starliner's automated timer was off by 11 hours during the December test flight.
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