SpaceX just let people crawl into its new spaceship for NASA astronauts â here's what it's like inside
SpaceX allowed a few reporters into its Hawthorne, California headquarters on Monday for close-up looks at a new spaceship and spacesuit for NASA astronauts.
The aerospace company, founded by tech mogul Elon Musk, built its Crew Dragon hardware as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Program. Boeing also designed a new seven-person space capsule for NASA called the CST-100 Starliner.
NASA launched the multibillion-dollar program in 2010 to replace the space shuttle, which the agency retired in July 2011, with privately developed American spacecraft â and stop paying Russia increasing prices to fly astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
Crewed test launches of the two spaceships are slated for 2019. However, SpaceX is poised to send the first commercial astronauts into space (in February), given that Boeing must fix leaky fuel valves on the CST-100 Starliner.
Some who attended SpaceX's event took video and photos of Crew Dragon's mock-ups, the flight simulator that astronauts use to train, and the spacesuit, and then shared them on Twitter and Instagram.
Here's a sample of some of the best footage and pictures, and what journalists said it was like inside:
