SpaceX Falcoln 9 Success With Dragon Capsule Orbit & Recovery

Discovery
Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcoln 9 rocket has made its second successful launch to orbit -- but this time it carried the Dragon capsule through two full orbits before a sea landing and recovery. Today's demonstration brings SpaceX that much closer to carrying space cargo to orbit, and eventually carrying astronauts into space.

The mission marked the first time a private company had returned a spacecraft from orbit, a key milestone in the company's quest to shoulder some of the cargo runs to the space station after NASA retires the shuttles next year. SpaceX, which is owned and operated by Elon Musk, is expected to share the work with Orbital Sciences Corp., which plans to test-fly its Taurus 4 rocket and Cygnus capsule next year.

By then, SpaceX may be well on its way to actually docking at the space station. Today's successful mission should help the firm's case to combine the two remaining test flights under its NASA-backed development program and berth a Dragon capsule at the station during its next flight, targeted for Spring or Summer 2011. _Discovery

If we are lucky, SpaceX and other private launch companies will team up with Robert Bigelow's space hotel enterprise and other private space enterprise companies, in a rapid proliferation of profitable space enterprise.

NASA has almost outlived its usefulness to the future of humans in space. Once space commerce becomes a profitable and going concern, we will see how differently things could have gone had the US been governed by more market-oriented leaders throughout the 50's, 60's, and 70's. The entire state-centered mentality that set up shop in the FDR administrations of the 1930s and 1940s doomed the US to a stagnant top-heavy government of lead-bottomed bureaucrats, which has only gotten worse with time.

We will have to see if some of the newer technologies can open up some non-state or minimal-state opportunities for ambitious market-oriented persons of the near future.