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EDIT:

IT LAUNCHED! I can't contain my excitement. That vehicle will transport astronauts to space stations (and beyond?) in the Dragon capsule.

At 11:48, stage separation confirmed, and 2nd stage ignition as well. So, so amazing!

At 11:54, Falcon 9 achieved earth orbit.

The video signal has now been lost (too far away, apparently!)

So, so cool.

--------

From the website:

    It looks as if we may have experienced a shutdown
    condition just after ignition. In these situations the
    vehicle puts itself into “safe mode”. There may be the
    chance to “recycle” the count and try again.
The reason appears to be (as of 10:57)

    We are hearing from Mission Control that the pad abort 
    involved an out-of-limit startup parameter.
It looks like they're going to try it again, but that was from 10:30 Pacific Time. (Edit: they say they are, as of 10:58.)

At 11:26 (PST), a bird flew by… still waiting on "T-zero time from Mission Control."

Retry scheduled for 11:45 (PST)!

Systems checks looking good (11:41 PST).

It's the little kid inside of me, I know, but I want SpaceX to succeed. Their goals have been dreams of mine all my life.




That was so awesome. My 8yr old was jumping up and down, cheering. It was just a beautiful launch.


I feel like I'm 4 all over again myself and watching the moonshot on our grainy black and white tv...

What a fantastic day this is. History was made today, I know there will be plenty of people to try to diminish the achievement by saying 'we did all this in the 60's', but what matters here is that it is not some government entity doing it, it's a company doing it and where there is one there'll be more.

Space is finally really being opened up, and with a bit of luck the pace will now accelerate.

I'm all for a second space race.


I completely agree. And also, yes, we did do it in the 60's and it was an amazing feat of science/math/engineering to have done so. But what really gets me... look at the technology we have available to us now compared to what it was 50 years ago. Once we get over the initial hurdles of making this work with modern technology in the private sector, things have changed and improved so much that the level of innovation is really just going to skyrocket, I think (pun fully intended!). It is extremely exciting that they did it now, but what's even more exciting is the potential of where this can now go.


Is there a replay somewhere?

I stopped watching it on CNN after the "abort" because I thought that meant for the rest of the day... :-(


main article link is now a youtube link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NREJEZ5eluk


Thanks! But the darn "buffering" skipped over some of the good parts...


Absolutely fantastic news, so much for all the naysayers.

Congratulations to everybody involved in this amazing achievement.




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