For the first time in history, a commercial spaceship has journeyed to the International Space Station, carrying vital supplies to the astronauts. NBC's Tom Costello reports.

By Alan Boyle

The International Space Station's crew reached out today with a robotic arm to grab SpaceX's Dragon cargo capsule and brought it in for the orbital outpost's first-ever hookup with a commercial spaceship.

It marks the station's first linkup with a U.S.-made spacecraft since last year's retirement of NASA's space shuttle fleet, and potentially opens the way for dozens of commercial cargo shipments. If the long-range plan unfolds as NASA hopes, U.S. astronauts could be shuttled back and forth on the Dragon or similar spacecraft within just a few years.

"Today, this really is the beginning of a new era in commercial spaceflight," said Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA's commercial crew and cargo program.

The hookup comes after Tuesday's successful launch of the Dragon atop a Falcon 9 rocket, and represents the culmination of years of planning and hundreds of millions of dollars of spending by NASA and California-basedSpaceX, known more formally as Space Exploration Technologies Corp. The company was founded a decade ago by dot-com billionaire Elon Musk, with aspirations of eventually sending humans to settle on Mars.

Musk said the technologies that were tested today will blaze a trail for those more ambitious trips to come. "This is a crucial step, and having achieved this step, itmakes the things in the future and the ultimate path toward humanity becoming a multiplanet species much, much more likely," he told reporters after the hookup. "The chances of that happening just went up dramatically, so people should be really excited about that."

But first things first: Today's operation marked the first full in-space test of the robotic Dragon spacecraft's procedure for approaching the station, and for that reason, every step along the way was carefully planned out and checked over the course of several hours.The first steps in the procedure were tested on Thursday, during a series of maneuvers that successfully brought the 14-foot-long, 12-foot-wide, gumdrop-shaped capsule within 2.5 kilometers (1.5 miles) of the $100 billion space station.

Today, a far more ambitious set of maneuvers brought the Dragon all the way to the station but the trip wasn't always easy.

Fixing the glitches The craft started out by taking up a position 250 meters (820 feet) below the station. From that vantage point, the Dragon was put through a series of maneuvers to test the station-to-spacecraft communication system. The space station's astronauts had the Dragon approach, then retreat, then approach, then hold its position.

The rest is here:

Space station grabs 'Dragon by the tail'