KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. – Nearly nine years ago, NASA astronaut Doug Hurley landed at Kennedy Space Center on space shuttle Atlantis and knew he would be one of the last to launch from Florida’s Coast for years.
But what he didn’t know is that he would also be one of the first to return human spaceflight to U.S. soil. On Saturday, Hurley returned to space, along with fellow NASA astronaut Bob Behnken, but this time it was at the beginning of a journey, not the end, and at the hands of SpaceX, a private space company founded a decade ago by billionaire Elon Musk.
Founded with the goal of human space exploration, SpaceX successfully accomplished that Saturday when it launched the two NASA astronauts on board its Crew Dragon spacecraft and