After nine years during which American astronauts had ridden Russian rockets to reach their own space station, the Florida coast once again thundered with a domestic launch. At 3:22 p.m. EDT on 30 May 2020, NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley roared skyward from Launch Complex 39A aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket topped by the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. It was the first launch of astronauts from American soil on an American rocket since Atlantis’s final flight in 2011, and the first crewed flight of a commercially built and operated spacecraft in history. Behnken, a U.S. Air Force flight test engineer and veteran of two shuttle missions and six spacewalks, served as joint operations commander; Hurley, a Marine Corps fighter and test pilot who had flown the final shuttle mission as pilot, commanded the spacecraft. In orbit, the crew tested manual flight controls before Crew Dragon autonomously docked with the International Space Station. The Demo-2 mission validated SpaceX’s crew transportation system—from launch pad to splashdown—and certified a new pathway for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. After 64 days in orbit, Behnken and Hurley splashed down off the coast of Florida on 2 August 2020, retrieved by a recovery ship in a scene reminiscent of the Mercury era, yet utterly modern. The flight proved that private enterprise and public purpose could join hands to carry humanity into space.