SpaceX private rocket, Falcon 1 orbits Earth

September 29th, 2008 | Science, Technology

By: D. H. Williams @ 9:48 AM - EST

Elon Musk’s privately funded SpaceX Falcon 1 spacecraft is now circling the Earth in precise orbit after being launched yesterday from the US Army’s Atoll in the Pacific known as Kwajalein.

The Falcon 1 was designed from scratch by SpaceX providing reliable but cheap access to space for smaller payloads. The company is working on a bigger rocket called the Falcon 9 which will be able to ferry astronauts to orbit and back inside the “Dragon” capsule.

“This is a great day for SpaceX and the culmination of an enormous amount of work by a great team,” said Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX. “The data shows we achieved a super precise orbit insertion—middle of the bull’s-eye — and then went on to coast and restart the second stage, which was icing on the cake.”

Preliminary data indicates that Falcon 1 achieved an elliptical orbit of 500 km by 700 km, 9.2 degrees inclination—exactly as targeted.

Today’s launch was greeted with enthusiasm by NASA as well since they currently expect to be without any astronaut capable launch vehicles after 2010. The Ares rockets and Orion capsules are supposed to come on line in the middle of the next decade, but delays to those programmes have already occurred.

Visits to the International Space Station will have to rely on Russian Soyez spacecraft but with cold war anxieties on the rise, our space cooperation agreement could be in jeopardy.