I watched this thing. Everything was perfect as usual.

News Alert Nov. 15, 7:38 p.m. EST

SpaceX launches first ‘operational’ mission of NASA’s commercial crew program, as capsule carries crew of 4 into orbit Aboard were one Japanese and three American astronauts for what is expected to be a six-month stay on the International Space Station. If the rest of the flight goes as planned, the capsule will dock at 11 p.m. ET Monday with the space station 250 miles above Earth. Read more

By Hamza Shaban and Christian Davenport

November 15, 2020 at 6:37 p.m. CST

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — SpaceX launched four astronauts to the International Space Station on Sunday in a spectacular evening liftoff that came days after the company’s Dragon capsule became the first privately owned and operated spacecraft to be certified by NASA for human spaceflight.

SpaceX earned that designation and the right to undertake what NASA hopes will be regular missions to the space station and back after it completed a test flight of two astronauts earlier this year. That May launch was the first of NASA astronauts from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011, forcing the United States to rely on Russia for flights to orbit for nearly a decade.

With Sunday’s launch, NASA took another step toward a new era in human spaceflight in which private companies partner with the government to build and design spacecraft and rockets. And it marked a coming-of-age moment for SpaceX, the California company founded by Elon Musk that was once viewed as a maverick start-up but is now one of the space industry’s stalwarts and one of NASA’s most significant partners.

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket ignited its nine engines and lifted off at 7:27 p.m. Eastern time from launchpad 39A, the historic swath of space real estate that hoisted the crew of Apollo 11 — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins — to the moon in 1969, as well as many space shuttle missions.

The launch was punctuated less than 10 minutes later, when the rocket booster returned to Earth and landed on a ship at sea so that it could be reused on another mission.

On board the SpaceX spacecraft were three NASA astronauts, Mike Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor Glover, as well as a Japanese astronaut, Soichi Noguchi. Though the space shuttle was capable of flying as many as eight people, Sunday’s flight was the first time four astronauts have ever flown in a capsule.

The crew will stay on board the space station for about six months, joining American Kate Rubins and Russian cosmonauts Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov. The mission comes as NASA and its international partners this month are celebrating 20 years of continuous human presence on the space station, an orbiting laboratory about 250 miles above Earth.

If all goes according to plan, the four astronauts aboard the capsule should reach the space station at about 11 p.m. Monday.