Fourth Time's A Charm: Elon Musk's SpaceX Launches

PayPal gazillionaire Elon Musk has been doing some interesting things with his windfall. There's Tesla Motors, which is producing high-end electric cars. And there's SpaceX, which has tried three times to launch a rocket into space on its own. Today, it worked. AP:

An Internet entrepreneur's latest effort to make space launch more affordable paid off Sunday when his commercial rocket, carrying a dummy payload, was lofted into orbit from the South Pacific.

It was the fourth attempt by Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, to launch its two-stage Falcon 1 rocket into orbit.

"Fourth time's a charm," said Elon Musk, the multimillionaire who started up SpaceX after making his fortune as the co-founder of PayPal Inc., the electronic payment system.

The rocket carried a 364-pound dummy payload designed and built by SpaceX for the launch.

"This really means a lot," Musk told a crowd of whooping employees. "There's only a handful of countries on Earth that have done this. It's usually a country thing, not a company thing. We did it."

Musk pledged to continue getting rockets into orbit, saying the company has resolved design issues that plagued previous attempts.

Last month, SpaceX lost three government satellites and human ashes including the remains of astronaut Gordon Cooper and "Star Trek" actor James Doohan after its third rocket was lost en route to space. The company blamed a timing error for the failure that caused the rocket's first stage to bump into the second stage after separation.

Want to follow along?: SpaceX has a Webcast, though we haven't been able to get live images. And Elon's brother Kimbal is Twittering, which doesn't provide cool screen shots, but does have interesting color, as we say.

See Also: Elon Musk's SpaceX Fails Third Launch