NASA's effort to resume flying American astronauts on American spacecraft — something that hasn't happened since the Space Shuttle program ended in 2011 — faces a major test this weekend.
Over the past decade, a lot of attention has been paid to billionaire space entrepreneurs like Elon Musk. His company, SpaceX, has been launching payloads into low Earth orbit for years, replete with balletic booster landings and even a space-going Tesla Roadster.
But as far as humans are concerned, the U.S. has been dependent on its chief geopolitical rival — Russia — to provide billions of dollars worth of taxi rides to the International Space Station.