Topic: Falcon 9 launch successful

[Nemesis]

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After one aborted countdown, a privately developed rocket that could take on many of the jobs now done by NASA's space shuttles reached orbit successfully on its first test flight Friday.

The launch marked a significant advance for California-based SpaceX's eight-year-old space program.

Liftoff came after hours of delay, sparked initially by launch-pad telemetry problems, then by a sailboat that strayed into a restricted area of the launch range. The day's first countdown was aborted at virtually the last second, due to a problem with the engine parameters, but the launch software was adjusted and a second countdown went all the way to the end.

Now for them to upgrade to a Falcon 9 Heavy launch.

[NJAntman]

If I could just win the lottery to invest some money in SpaceX... the payoff would be worth the wait when they hopefully mature.

[stoneyface]

i just love how the falcon 9 was observed far away as a ufo! congrats to the falcon 9 team.

[Nemesis]

SpaceX with the Falcons (1, 9 and 9 Heavy), Scaled Composites with SpaceShip One and Two and other companies may well revolutionize near space usage driving costs way down and usage way up.  Hopefully they will and push NASA and other national space agencies back to basic research further out. 

This might have happened sooner but for various international efforts to restrict private space travel. As I recall in the U.S. at one point a regulation was made requiring special permission for ANY rocket launch.  After they were inundated with requests for permissions to launch model rockets they lightened up a little.  I give a great deal of credit to the X-Prize competition for starting things off.

I really want to see some of the manufacturing in space that has been talked about for ages.  I'd love to see a robotics firm team up with SpaceX and put their own robot moon base in place and start mining and manufacturing there.