SPACEX OPENS NEW FRONTIER IN SPACE TRAVEL

SpaceX just achieved a feat that even CEO Elon Musk thought improbable when he founded the rocket company in 2002: flying people to and from space, according to a report from Business Insider.

On Sunday afternoon, NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley safely careened back to Earth after a 27-million-mile mission in orbit around the planet. The men flew in SpaceX's new Crew Dragon spaceship, landing the cone-shaped capsule at 2:48 p.m. ET in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola, Florida.

Ahead of the landing, the crew undocked from the $150 billion International Space Station, where they'd spent 63 days, then performed a series of maneuvers to return home to their families. The capsule handily survived a blistering 3,500-degree-Fahrenheit return through Earth's atmosphere, a high-stakes parachute deployment, and the final splashdown.

Shortly after 4 p.m. ET, a SpaceX and NASA recovery crew pulled the astronauts from their toasted ship. 

"Thanks for doing the most difficult part and the most important part of human spaceflight: sending us into orbit and bringing us home safely," Behnken said shortly before leaving the spaceship, which he and Hurley named Endeavour. "Thank you again for the good ship Endeavour."

"It's absolutely been an honor and a pleasure to work with you, from the entire SpaceX team," a capsule communicator responded from mission control at SpaceX's headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

SpaceX privately designed, built, and operated the vehicle with about $2.7 billion in contracts from NASA's Commercial Crew Program. The money helped SpaceX create its newfound spaceflight capability and is funding about half a dozen missions — including Behnken and Hurley's demonstration flight, Demo-2, which launched on May 30.

With Demo-2's completion, SpaceX has put an end to a nine-year drought of crewed spaceflight from US soil. The company also resurrected NASA's ability to reach the ISS, where the agency hopes to ramp up work to help it return humans to the moon and eventually reach Mars.

The mission's end likely brings SpaceX just weeks from a NASA certification of its Crew Dragon for regular flights of astronauts — and private citizens.