First Flight Fortunate

[krpalmer]

I managed to hear today that the first flight of the Falcon 9 rocket built by SpaceX did get into orbit, and given that four flights of their previous model were needed before one worked, and I noticed a certain amount of trying to manage expectations beforehand, things seem to have worked well. Of course, the rocket has moved from "trying to show up the existing aerospace industry" to being seriously talked about as fitting into established patterns, so the news is perhaps more significant to me than it once might have been.