SPACEX TO LAUNCH PRIVATE ROCKET TODAY

So, there's this guy who founds PayPal. A few years later he makes $150 million selling PayPal to eBay and founds his own rocket-building company. A couple years after that, he's ready to launch his first rocket, the Falcon I.

Pretty damn cool.

Sadly, he's only interested in lofting satellites into space instead of people which is where the actual human advancement is at, but hey, I'm all for non-bloated-governmental-interests getting involved in space stuff. Hell, in the end, I'm all for anyone getting into space stuff.

The Falcon I's maiden voyage was supposed to be yesterday but there was a scheduling conflict with a missile defense system test by the US Army that ended up having to happen on the same day. Yeah, like that stupid defense system will ever work!

Anyway, so it's set to launch today from [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omelek_Island|Omelek Island], which is one of the Marshall Islands, I believe. I'll post more when I hear how the launch went.

In the meantime, you can check out [http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-rocket26nov26,1,1529248.story?coll=la-headlines-technology|an article] at LATimes.com about the launch or check out SpaceX.com to get the official spin.

UPDATE 11/27/5: She didn't launch. According to [http://www.spacex.com/index.html?section=updates&content=http%3A//www.spacex.com/updates.php|the official press release] :

What happened was that an auxiliary liquid oxygen (LOX) fill tank had a manual vent valve incorrectly set to vent. The time it took to correct the problem resulted in significant LOX boiloff and loss of helium, and it was the latter that caused the launch abort. LOX is used to chill the helium bottles, so we lose helium if there is no LOX to cool the bottles.

Although we were eventually able to refill the vehicle LOX tanks, the rate at which we could add helium was slower than the rate at which LOX was boiling away. There was no way to close the gap, so the launch had to be called off. In addition, we experienced an anomaly with the main engine computer that requires further investigation and was arguably reason in and of itself to postpone launch.

We anticipate a new launch attempt in mid-December, depending on the timing of LOX resupply from Hawaii (our LOX plant on Omelek can only produce about one ton per day).

So, at least they tried. Hopefully we'll hear more in December.