Liftoff of SpaceX Falcon 9

[pokerfan]

By W.J. Hennigan

May 22, 2012, 1:00 a.m.
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket roared to life before dawn at Cape Canaveral, Fla., and blasted into space on a column of fire that lit the night sky for miles around.

The nine-engine rocket lifted off at 3:44 a.m. EDT carrying a cone-shaped space capsule that's set to berth with the International Space Station later this week.

http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-spacex-launch-space-station-20120521,0,4066674.story

[anon-y-moose]

1. low earth orbit and capitalism. a marriage made in heaven...yawn!

[RoccoR5955]

2. Though I do appreciate everything that the Space Program brought us...

I do not appreciate this commercialism of space travel, and development.
The reason being, that all the benefits, the patents, and other developments that NASA made were in the public domain, which means that anyone can use or modify them. Now that these will be in private corporations' hands, we will have to pay more for new developments in technology, that otherwise would have been royalty free.

[dembotoz]

3. to end the space shuttle program with no replacement was (is ) a mistake