It’s not yet the same as hopping on commuter flight from New York to Washington or renting a car from Avis, but Sunday’s launch of four astronauts to the International Space Station in a capsule built by SpaceX was a momentous step towards making space travel commonplace and mundane.

In the future, instead of relying on spacecraft built by Nasa or other governments, Nasa astronauts and anyone else with enough money can by a ticket on a commercial rocket.

“This is truly a commercial launch vehicle,” Jim Bridenstine, the Nasa administrator, said during a post-launch news conference, “and we’re grateful to our partners at SpaceX for providing it”.

Nasa designated Sunday night’s launch as the first operational flight of the Crew Dragon spacecraft built and operated by SpaceX, the rocket company started by Elon Musk. The four astronauts aboard — three from Nasa, one from JAXA, the Japanese space agency — left Earth from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

A Crew Dragon took two astronauts — Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley — to the space station in May, but that was a test flight to shake out remaining glitches in the systems.

The four astronauts on this flight are Michael S. Hopkins, Shannon Walker and Victor J. Glover of Nasa and Soichi Noguchi, a Japanese astronaut. Nasa and SpaceX last week completed the certification process.

New York Times News Service