SpaceX's Ship Blasted Off This Morning, Bound for the International Space Station

http://youtu.be/4vkqBfv8OMM It's been a rocky few years for spaceflight. NASA's budget isn't getting any bigger. And though the Space Shuttle program was expensive, dangerous, and kept better designs from being developed, once it ended last year, US astronauts have had to hitch rides on Russian rockets, which are themselves not too reliable. But this morning's launch of SpaceX's first International Space Station supply rocket was a bright spot. NASA is betting on the private sector to bring about the next great space age. It has made grants to various private space flight companies, including PayPal founder Elon Musk's Space Exploration Technologies, colloquially known as SpaceX, to develop space taxi technologies and supply the International Space Station. And early this morning, after an aborted launch attempt on Sunday, SpaceX's first rocket left Earth, carrying a capsule bound for the space station. You can watch the unmanned vehicle take off in the video above, and you can hear in the excitement in the NASA launch commentator's voice as the fiery ship takes off through the night.