On Monday, the four crew members were driven to the place of the launchpad, winding through the roads of Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the help of a police escort, as a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched overhead in an unrelated Starlink mission.
Wang wrote on a X post “We're gonna watch a rocket launch while on our way to a rocket launch,”, posting the text alongside with a video from the Falcon 9 climbing the skies to space during their drive.
This counts as SpaceX’s sixth private astronaut mission. Even more so, it is the company’s latest novel effort that expands its dominance in the global human spaceflight area. It also comes as Musk’s power as SpaceX CEO and the world’s richest man soars as he works as a close adviser to U.S. President Donald Trump, a position that also has given him extraordinary influence for a businessman over an array of U.S. policy matters.
It is also worth mentioning that Fram2 counts as the 16th crewed mission overall, using the reusable Crew Dragon. This is one of the spacecraft that SpaceX developed with NASA funding in order to provide the U.S. space agency a ride for its astronauts to and from the ISS (International Space Station).
SpaceX and its Dragon Craft have also dominated the market when it comes to private orbital spaceflight. It is also worth mentioning that Dragos is the world’s only privately built capsule routinely flying a mission in orbit, as Boeing’s Starliner capsule is held up in development, reported Reuters.
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