President Donald Trump will watch American astronauts blast into orbit from the Kennedy Space Center for the first time in more than a decade on coming  Wednesday.

It will be the first time since the space shuttle program ended in 2011 that US astronauts will launch into space aboard an American rocket from American soil.

The USP of this event, however, is that Elon Musk's SpaceX is the conductor and NASA the customer as businesses begin chauffeuring astronauts to the International Space Station.

Vice President Mike Pence, who is chairman of the National Space Council, also plans to attend Wednesday's launch. 

The NASA/SpaceX Commercial Crew flight test launch will carry NASA's newest test pilots, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

They're scheduled to blast off from launch pad 39A, the same one the Apollo astronauts used to get to the moon.