Trailing an orange pillar of flame, a rocket designed and built by a company founded by a Silicon Valley billionaire became the first privately developed, privately financed rocket to reach Earth's orbit today, potentially blazing a much cheaper pathway to space.
On its fourth attempt to reach orbit, the Falcon 1 rocket launched by Space Exploration Technologies Corp., the company founded by PayPal founder and Tesla Motors chairman Elon Musk, reached orbit at 4:26 p.m. Pacific time, about 10 minutes after it was launched from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean.
"Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed launch vehicle to reach Earth orbit from the ground!" launch commentator Max Vozoff exclaimed as the Falcon 1's second-stage engine cut-off, its onboard camera showing a stunning view of the blue Earth more than 100 miles below.
"SpaceX has designed and developed this vehicle from the ground up, from a blank sheet of paper, and we have achieved this with a company that is only now 500 people, and we've done this in only six years," Vozoff said. "And this is just the ground-breaker."
The company, known as SpaceX, hopes to slash the cost of reaching Earth orbit by a factor of 10, seeding a burst of innovation that some believe will do for space what the Apple II did for computing.
"That's what the Apple computer did. It brought down the cost to have the ability to get on there and play around with things, without having to run to somebody's mainframe computer," said Bob Twiggs, an emeritus professor of astronautics at Stanford University. "I'm excited about the freedom it gives everybody."
Today's flight was the fourth attempt by SpaceX to place its liquid-fueled Falcon 1 design into orbit. The third attempt failed Aug. 2, losing not only a Department of Defense payload, but also the ashes of more than 200 people, including astronaut Gordon Cooper and actor James Doohan, who played "Scotty" on Star Trek.
But today the 70-foot Falcon 1 followed a picture-perfect 10-minute flight into orbit. It lifted off perfectly from Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, about 8,000 miles southwest of Los Angeles, carrying a dummy payload into space.
The company began a live Web cast of the launch about 15 minutes before the 4:16 p.m. liftoff, showing the 70-foot-tall rocket standing next to swaying palm trees, its white and gray body trailing white wisps of boiling liquid oxygen.
Source: http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10584754