Click here to view the embedded video.

On Friday, June 4^th, the Falcon 9 test rocket from the private company Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX was  successfully launched from Cape Kennedy and reached orbit about 9 minutes later.

This is the first flight of the Falcon 9 and the first of three demo flights on tap for this year. The second demo flight is going to include the Dragon. The Dragon is an autonomous vehicle capable of carrying cargo OR astronauts to the ISS.

From the SpaceX website:

This “COTS 1” Dragon will perform several orbits of the Earth, followed by reentry and splashdown off the coast of Southern California. We will gather performance data and retire significant amounts of risk on key spacecraft systems, including Draco thrusters, the Dragon communication systems, PICA-X high performance heat shield material, and other critical navigation, reentry, landing and recovery systems.

Note: COTS stands for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.

They even have cargo pricing on the site, if you have some time go poke around they have LOTS of information.

Perhaps the Shuttle to US human spaceflight void will not be very long.  If they can pull it off they (and the US) will have something nobody else in the world has – a functioning private space program.

Yes this is VERY good news.

Oh yeah, here’s the source for the video.