Four private astronauts blasted into space early on Tuesday in a modified SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule, kicking off the company's five-day Polaris Dawn mission, which aims to test new spacesuit designs and conduct the first private spacewalk, Caspian Energy Media reports with reference to Reuters.
The crew, a billionaire entrepreneur, a retired military fighter pilot and two SpaceX employees, lifted off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida about 5:23 a.m.
he mission's Falcon 9 booster landed safely on a seaborne pad.
It is Crew Dragon's fifth - and riskiest - private mission so far. The spacecraft will eventually settle into an oval-shaped orbit, passing as close to Earth as 190 km (118 miles) and as far as 1,400 km (870 miles), the farthest any humans will have ventured since the end of the U.S. Apollo moon program in 1972.
An attempt to launch last month was postponed hours before liftoff over a small helium leak in ground equipment on SpaceX's launchpad. SpaceX fixed the leak, but the company's Falcon 9 was then grounded by U.S. regulators over a booster recovery failure during an unrelated mission, further delaying the Polaris launch. The launch on Tuesday was delayed about two hours because of unfavorable weather.
