America's newest capsule for astronauts rocketed Saturday toward the International Space Station on a high-stakes test flight by SpaceX.
The only passenger was a life-size test dummy, named Ripley after the lead character in the "Alien" movies. SpaceX needs to nail the debut of its crew Dragon capsule before putting people on board later this year.
"To be frank, I'm a little emotionally exhausted," Musk told reporters barely an hour after liftoff. "We have to dock to the station. We have to come back, but so far it's worked ... we've passed the riskiest items.
NASA turned to private companies, SpaceX and Boeing, and has provided them $8 billion to build and operate crew capsules to ferry astronauts to and from the space station. Now Russian rockets are the only way to get astronauts to the 250-mile-high outpost. Soyuz tickets have skyrocketed over the years; NASA currently pays $82 million per seat.
SpaceX already has made 16 trips to the space station using cargo Dragons. The white crew Dragon is slightly bigger -- 27 feet tip to tip -- and considerably fancier and safer. Musk said the redesigned capsule has "hardly a part in common" with its predecessor. As many as seven astronauts could squeeze in, although four will be the norm once flights get going, allowing for a little cargo room. About 450 pounds of supplies are going up on this flight.
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