It's a New World

Early Tuesday morning (2:44 am Central) the private company SpaceX launched an unmanned spacecraft full of cargo to the ISS. SpaceX was given seed money from the government as part of a program to develop commercial spaceflight capabilities. It was a long road for them, including several scrubs over the past few weeks. Spaceflight is not easy, as we seem to have to keep learning, and I am happy to see them finally get off the pad. Read more about their launch here.

Source

This morning the Dragon capsule was grappled (plucked out of empty space, amazingly, while both Dragon and ISS were traveling 17,000 mph, 220 miles above the earth) by the station's robotic arm (read a semi-live-blog from Houston Chronicle here and official NASA coverage here) and will be berthed (attached to another module) in order to allow the astronauts to open it up and take all the cargo out.
From now on we live in a world where a commercial company flies to the ISS. Amazing.

By far my favorite picture of the week:

Dragon launches over Mission Space in Epcot. Source

I do love the confluence of Disney World and space! It's a whole new world. Update: check out video of capture if you missed it live. Truly amazing... http://t.co/GzvQpKzZ