Operational commercial flights to the International Space Station (ISS) utilizing the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft became a reality at 7:27 p.m. on 15 November 2020 when a Falcon 9 rocket launched from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center on the Crew-1 mission. Aboard the Dragon spacecraft, named Resilience, were four astronauts, NASA astronauts Shannon Walker, Victor Glover, and Mike Hopkins, and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) astronaut Soichi Noguchi, destined for a six-month stay on the ISS.

After successfully docking, the astronauts of Crew-1 will be welcomed aboard station by NASA astronaut Kate Rubins and Sergey Ryzhikov and Sergey Kud-Sverchkov of the Russian space agency Roscosmos. For the first time, the space station’s crew will expand to seven people with Expedition 64, increasing the amount of crew time available for research.

The Falcon 9 first stage successfully landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship stationed out in the Atlantic Ocean approximately eight minutes after the launch.