It's a Bird. It's a Plane. It's a Private Rocket!

Look, a private company blasted a rocket into orbit today!

Read all about it here.

In my 2006 piece on high hopes for the private space industry here, I wrote:

Elon Musk, the founder of PayPal, now runs SpaceX, which is developing the Falcon rocket series, designed to be a cheap, reusable means of getting satellites and eventually heavier space vehicles for human use into orbit. Falcon testing has been mostly unsuccessful to date, with several delayed launches and an unfortunate fire at the first launch, which sent the rocket crashing into the ocean.

An "almost flawless" first flight for the Falcon 9 is a huge success.

UPDATE: Video!