Take That Governments, First Private Rocket Makes Orbit

After a few failed attempts SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket has made it out of the earth's atmosphere to become the first "privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit.", a rocket in space in other words.

Previous attempts have been plagued with problemss and disasters, but SpaceX (founded by Tesla Motor's Chairman and Co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk) has finally done it.

The liftoff was webcast live via the company's website which was continuously updated with news, including a message written at 16:26PDT reading:

T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s

Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) - Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!!!!!!

Thanks for the heads-up Engadget.

First Spy Shot of Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo

Today Engadget has posted the first actual photo of Richard "Virgin" Branson's SpaceShip Two, or at least part of it.

SpaceShip Two (SST) is the aircraft that will actually go out into orbit with help from its carrier craft WhiteKnight Two as part of the world's first commercial "space tourism" industry lead by Virgin Galactic.

Google Guy Goes Galactic

Engadget reports that Sergey Brin, one of the 2 founders of Google, has forked out a large wad of paper ($5M USD) to buy a ticket (invest) on Space Adventure's flight to the ISS in 2011 aboard the Russian Soyuz rocket. Perhaps he just wants to check out how realistic the Google Earth images are.