SpaceX Falcon 9 Rocket Reaches Earth’s Orbit on First Flight
June 04, 2010, 3:05 PM EDT
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By Chris Dolmetsch
June 4 (Bloomberg) -- Space Exploration Technologies Inc., one of the companies at the center of President Barack Obama’s plans for NASA, launched a new rocket designed to take cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 took off on its first test flight at about 2:45 p.m. local time from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. It reached the Earth’s orbit about nine minutes later. The company’s first rocket, the Falcon 1, took four attempts before it reached orbit in September 2008.
Falcon 9 is designed to compete with launch vehicles such as the Atlas and Delta from United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin Corp. SpaceX, led by PayPal Inc. co-founder Elon Musk, plans to use the rocket to carry into orbit its Dragon spacecraft, which is intended to take cargo to the orbiting outpost after the space shuttles are retired and may later ferry U.S. astronauts.
SpaceX’s vessels are part of Obama’s new strategy for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which calls for the agency to develop systems capable of taking humans to Mars while helping entrepreneurs build vessels to carry astronauts to the space station.
NASA in 2008 awarded the Hawthorne, California-based company and Orbital Sciences Corp. $3.5 billion in contracts to deliver cargo to the station through 2016.
An earlier attempt to launch today was scrubbed seconds before ignition when the rocket put itself into safe mode after experiencing a “shutdown condition,” SpaceX said on its website.
--Editors: Mark Schoifet
To contact the reporter on this story: Chris Dolmetsch at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at msilva34@bloomberg.net.
