Livestream: NASA SpaceX Rocket Launches Successfully

CAPE CANAVERAL, FL — Despite more bad weather in the forecast, NASA made a successful second attempt Saturday at launching a rocket ship designed and built by Elon Musk's SpaceX company.

With the flight already delayed three days by bad weather, forecasters put the odds of acceptable conditions at 50-50 for the 3:22 p.m. liftoff of the 270-foot Falcon 9.

Post-launch coverage can be viewed on NASA TV or on SpaceX's YouTube channel.

This was the first launch of astronauts into orbit by a private company. It's also NASA’s first human spaceflight launched from U.S. soil in nearly a decade.

NASA hired SpaceX and Boeing in 2014 to taxi astronauts to and from the space station, under contracts totaling $7 billion, The Associated Press reported. Both companies launched their crew capsules last year with test dummies. SpaceX’s Dragon aced all of its objectives, while Boeing’s Starliner capsule ended up in the wrong orbit and was almost destroyed because of software errors.

Manning the flight are veteran astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken. Their destination is the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth.

President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence planned to return for the second launch attempt.