Astronauts awarded Space Medal of Honor

Vice President Kamala Harris has awarded former NASA astronauts Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken the Congressional Space Medal of Honor for bravery in NASA’s SpaceX Demonstration Mission-2 (Demo-2) to the International Space Station in 2020. On May 30, 2020, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the company’s Crew Dragon spacecraft launched to the space station, marking the first mission to launch with astronauts as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. Demo-2 served as an end-to-end flight test of SpaceX’s crew transportation system, providing valuable data toward NASA certifying the system for regular, crewed missions to the orbiting laboratory under the agency’s Commercial Crew Program.