On November 17, SpaceX’s Dragon docked on the International Space Station after Falcon-9 launched the ship into orbit from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

NASA astronauts Mike Hopkins, Victor Glover, Shannon Walker, and JAXA astronaut Soichi Noguchi, flew along on the Dragon space station on their first six-month operational mission as part of the Commercial Crew Program.

“I think space travel is very important nowadays, especially when we make historical advancements like these,” said junior Jacob Garcia.

Space travel has always been important for everyone. Every day we get closer to discovering new things, such as landing on Mars. With this being the first time NASA has let a privately owned plane go to space, it is considered a historic event. This space launch is one of three Dragon launches planned for 2020-2021.

“I’m thrilled to see that SpaceX accomplished this,” said sophomore Bryan Fuentes. 

The Dragon is the turning point for America’s future in space exploration. It is the return of human spaceflight to the United States with one of the safest, most advanced systems ever built. It lays out the groundwork for missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond. 

“It’s nice to see that with all these new advancements from everybody, SpaceX has had the most success,” Garcia said. 

Over the last decade, NASA has spent $6 billion helping companies develop new commercial, human-rated spacecraft. In 2014, to complete the development of the Crew Dragon and Starliner crew capsules, the space agency chose SpaceX and Boeing as partners, according to spaceflightnow.com. SpaceX has had many accomplishments in the past couple of years.