Verge Staff After more than six years of intense development, SpaceX is set to launch its first people to space on the company’s newly developed Crew Dragon capsule. It’s a major flight test for SpaceX as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, an initiative to have private companies — not the government — create new vehicles that can carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX’s first two passengers are veteran NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. The duo is set to take off inside SpaceX’s capsule from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Saturday, May 30th, at 3:22PM ET. When they do, it’ll mark the first time since the end of the Space Shuttle program in 2011 that US astronauts have flown to orbit from American soil. It will also be the first time that a privately made vehicle carries people to orbit. Follow along as The Verge covers all of the updates from this historic flight. Jun 2, 2020 NASA and SpaceX still targeting May for first crewed mission to space amid coronavirus pandemic After six years of developing a new passenger spacecraft for NASA, SpaceX is finally on track to launch its very first crew to the International Space Station in mid-to-late May — but uncertainty surrounds the flight as the novel coronavirus pandemic worsens in the US. On Wednesday, NASA put out a call for press to cover the mission from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but if current restrictions remain in place over the next couple of months, changes will likely need to be made as the mission proceeds. Despite the pandemic, the mission itself is set to be historic. The last time astronauts launched to orbit from the United States was July 8th, 2011 — the last flight of NASA’s Space Shuttle. Since then, NASA astronauts have relied on Russia’s Soyuz rocket to get to and from the International Space Station. Each seat on that vehicle costs the space agency more than $70 million. In order to move launches back to US soil, in 2014 NASA tasked two companies — Boeing and SpaceX — with developing private space capsules that can ferry astronauts to the ISS, part of an initiative called the Commercial Crew Program. Now, SpaceX is finally poised to launch its first human passengers on its new Crew Dragon vehicle, marking the first time a commercial vehicle has launched people to orbit.