Astronauts could be flying again from US soil as early as this summer after the flawless launch of SpaceX’s privately built Crew Dragon capsule opened “a new era in American excellence”, according to the head of the space agency Nasa.

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The unmanned spacecraft lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the early hours of Saturday, atop a Falcon 9 rocket. It is scheduled to dock with the international space station on Sunday, for a five-day visit that will test the systems and operations required to allow humans to be aboard the first manned mission pencilled in for July.

The milestone test flight, packed with supplies for the space station and crewed by a sensor-clad dummy named Ripley – after Sigourney Weaver’s character in the Alien movies – edges the US closer to ending an eight-year drought in launching humans into space caused by the retirement of Nasa’s space shuttle fleet in July 2011.

Since then the agency has had to pay its former space race adversary Russia about $81m per seat to ferry American astronauts to the space station aboard ageing Soyuz rockets.

“Today’s successful launch marks a new chapter in American excellence, getting us closer to once again flying American astronauts on American rockets from American soil,” Jim Bridenstine, the Nasa administrator, said in a tweet posted minutes after the spectacular 2.49am launch he also called “a major milestone in our nation’s history”.

Bridenstine expanded on his thoughts at a post-launch press conference in which he paid tribute to international agreements that kept the US in space for almost a decade and looked ahead to a new era of government-private partnership.

“We want to make sure we keep our partnership with Russia, which has been very strong for a long time going back to the Apollo-Soyuz era, but we also want to make sure we have our own capability to get back and forth to the international space station,” he said.

“But I think another big milestone here is the idea that we’re not, as an agency, as Nasa, we’re not purchasing, owning and operating our own rockets at this point. We’re looking to a future where we can be a customer, one customer of many customers in a very robust commercial marketplace in lower Earth orbit.”

SpaceX, a California-based company founded by the billionaire Elon Musk, the co-founder of PayPal, has already proven to be a successful commercial partner, carrying supplies and equipment to the space station orbiting 250 miles above Earth dozens of times on its fleet of reusable Falcon 9 booster rockets and Dragon cargo capsules.

With its main rival Boeing, SpaceX is also one of the two lead partners in Nasa’s commercial crew programme, set up to hand over the development and construction of next-generation, near-Earth spacecraft and launch systems while the government agency concentrates on deeper space ambitions such as the moon and Mars.

SpaceX has a contract worth $2.6bn while the next step in Boeing’s $4.2bn programme is scheduled to be an unmanned test flight of its CST-100 Starliner in April.

Musk, a technology pioneer who also founded the electric car maker Tesla, said the launch had left him drained.

“To be frank, I’m a little emotionally exhausted,” he said. “That was super stressful, but it worked, so far. We have to dock with the station, we have to come back, but so far it has worked. We have passed some of the riskiest items.”

He also paid tribute to his 6,000 employees at SpaceX.

“It’s been 17 years to get to this point, from 2002 until now, an incredible amount of hard work and sacrifice from a lot of people to have gotten to this point. I’d also like to express great appreciation for Nasa. SpaceX wouldn’t be here without Nasa, without the incredible work that was done before SpaceX even started and without the support after SpaceX did start.”

The two Nasa astronauts who will crew the first manned mission, former military pilots Doug Hurley and Robert Behnken, watched the launch from the SpaceX control room three miles from the launchpad.

“I can’t begin to explain how exciting it is for a test pilot to be on a first flight of a mission,” Hurley said, looking forward to the planned summer mission.