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SpaceX has made history. Its privately developed rocket has made it into space.

After three failed launches, the company founded by Elon Musk worked all of the bugs out of their Falcon 1 launch vehicles.

The entire spectacle was broadcast live from Kwajalein Atoll in the South Pacific. Cameras mounted on the spacecraft showed our planet shrinking in the distance and the empty first stage engine falling back to Earth.

As the rocket ascended, cheers rang out during every crucial step of the launch sequence, and at the final stage their headquarters in Hawthorne, California erupted in excitement. (Wired.com viewed the launch over the Internet on SpaceX's live webcast.)

The tensest moment came just before stage separation. At that critical juncture, the third launch attempt had failed. This time, it worked out perfectly.

Eight minutes after leaving the ground, Falcon 1 reached a speed of 5200 meters per second and passed above the International Space Station.

"I don't know what to say... because my mind is just blown," said Musk, during a brief address to his staff after the successful launch. "This is just the first step of many."

The feat is a giant leap forward for privately-funded space ventures, and follows the spectacular 2004 suborbital flight of SpaceShipOne. (See related Wired Science story: "Space Visionaries Prove Naysayers Wrong - Again".)

Musk seemed almost overcome with emotion. In the coming years, his company will try to make space transportation ten times cheaper and more reliable.

After making a fortune as the co-founder of PayPal, he recruited some of the best aerospace engineers in the world and challenged them to build a launch vehicle from scratch.

SpaceX had scrubbed its fourth launch attempt just a week earlier to swap out a liquid oxygen feed line, signaling the extreme caution of the group after three failed tries.

Falcon 1's first flight in 2006 lasted less than a minute, the second flight in 2007 fired for 7.5 minutes, and the third flight last month encountered a staging separation anomaly just shy of three minutes.

The team's analysis of Flight 3 suggested they didn't wait long enough after the first-stage engine was done firing to separate it from the second stage.

The recently beefed-up, first-stage Merlin engine had more kick in it than the previous version of the engine, and after separation still had enough energy to run into the second stage above it, sending it tumbling off course.

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Wiccan_Seeker said:

Why the hell didnt I see this on the news

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Kada said:

I wonder how long it will take the government to buy the companies that developed their own spaceships. If they start doing things that nasa cant, or find things interresting, will the government step in and take control?

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Private companies are already much much more efficient that nasa.  It's free market vs command market.. it will always be better.

If the government gets more involved, it will be bad.  Just like any other area of life

badchad said:

If they outdo NASA, the government will hire them to do their work.

I think this is unlikely however, since their primary goal is (likely to be) motivation, not scientific research.

And while I don't know their budgets, I would think NASA has much more resources.

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Unless somehting was found on mars that was worth the effort.

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The moon has that! The moon has Tritium in its top soil, which in some decades can be minerd and used for fusion energy production. In terms of energy yield, the entire moon is a rich oil field, but of clean energy, and its right at the surface

Kada said:

TO THE MOON!

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