SpaceX is about to launch its first astronauts, and the stakes for Elon Musk's rocket company and NASA are epic

Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the hope of inspiring Mars exploration.

These days, though, SpaceX dreams of flying people around the moon and later landing some on the surface, then moving on to establish Martian cities, drop a million settlers there, and back up the human race from some global calamity.

But if SpaceX is to have any hope of achieving such grand visions, the rocket company must first prove it can safely fly people to and from low-Earth orbit, a stepping stone to all deep-space destinations.

This makes the stakes of SpaceX's next rocket launch, a mission called Demo-2, so high. If weather, hardware, and other factors cooperate, the company's Crew Dragon spaceship will lift off next Wednesday at 4:33 p.m. ET — and mark SpaceX's first mission with passengers in the company's 18-year history.
But it's not just SpaceX with so much of its plans on the line.

NASA is entrusting SpaceX with the lives of two of its most experienced astronauts, Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley, the duo set to pilot Crew Dragon on a roughly 110-day mission.

Through its larger Commercial Crew Program — which lets companies lead the development, construction, launch, and operation of spacecraft — the space agency has also invested more than $3.14 billion in SpaceX to create its new spaceflight capability. NASA has sunk an additional $4.8 billion into Boeing's CST-100 Starliner spaceship system too.

But for NASA, as for SpaceX, the launch of Demo-2 represents so much more — and it's a big reason the space agency and the rocket company are pressing to launch the mission despite the coronavirus pandemic.

Here are some of the biggest things at stake.