The Crew Dragon spacecraft currently in orbit round the Earth has a single occupant, a test dummy called Ripley, named after the astronaut heroine of the film Alien. As human presences go, it is not much. Yet the spaceship’s flight represents a milestone in US manned spaceflight.

Almost eight years since its last astronauts flew on the space shuttle Atlantis, the US is now on the threshold of returning astronauts to space. Success with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon this week, culminating in an undamaged splash down in the Atlantic on Friday, will surely see the start of manned flights in Dragon spaceships.

And that will just be the beginning. Waiting in the wings is another fledgling spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner which will also carry crew to the International Space Station. By 2020, both SpaceX and Boeing could both be ferrying men and women into space. Nasa will no longer have to buy places on Russia’s Soyuz craft at a cost of $85m (£65m) a seat and will be able to leave low-orbit manned flights to private business operators.

The agency will then be free to take humans to more distant, ambitious destination: the moon and then asteroids and, finally, Mars. This will be achieved in a new generation of Orion spaceships, built in cooperation with the European Space Agency and scheduled for launch in two or three years. The US will then go back to the days of space spectaculars which, in future, will include the construction of space stations that orbit the moon or craft that land on asteroids. All are headline-making missions and they are badly needed by a nation whose position as the world’s greatest space power is now under threat from China, India and others. Freed of mundane space flights that will be taken up by Crew Dragon, Nasa will now find these reputation-restoring missions easier to organise.