A couple hours ago, aerospace startup SpaceX succeeded in launching a two-stage Falcon 1 rocket to sub-orbital space, attaining an altitude of 300 kilometers before the second stage shut down prematurely. Anomalies aside, this is a pretty significant step in the privatization of spaceflight — for perspective, consider that the International Space Station orbits the Earth at approximately 360 km.

Blast-off from the Omelek Island launch pad at Kwajalein Atoll in the Pacific.

This second Falcon test flight, dubbed the Demo-2, didn’t yet reach its intended circular orbit of 685 km, to where it was to deliver a 50 kg experimental NASA payload. It did, however, achieve the primary mission objective of validating the rocket’s structural design and avionics, and set a new private spaceflight altitude record to boot.

Space buffs will recall that it was just three years ago, in 2004, that the CSXT team launched the first private rocket to reach the final frontier (gaining a verified altitude of 115 km), and Scaled Composites won the X Prize with their SpaceShipOne craft that made the first privately funded human spaceflight (to 112 km).

Rocket-cam view of the first stage falling back towards the Earth, just before second stage ignition.

So, tech hectomillionaire and space entrepreneur Elon Musk’s bold venture is starting to pay off — good thing, too, as he reportedly has invested over $100 million of his personal wealth to bootstrap the company.

The Falcon 1 is billed as the world’s first privately funded and developed liquid-fueled orbital launch vehicle, and is currently priced at $7 million a pop — significantly cheaper than any previous orbital delivery solution. It’s a two-stage kerosene—liquid-oxygen design capable of delivering a LEO payload of up to 670 kg. The rocket is built to be simple, reliable and dirt-cheap. As Elon says:

“The Merlin is much more analogous to a truck engine than a sports car engine, which is how all other engines are designed. Instead of designing it to the bleeding edge of performance and drawing out every last ounce of thrust, we designed Merlin to be easy to build, easy to fix and robust. It can take a beating and still keep going.”

Elon has stated that his dream is to revolutionize access to space by ultimately improving cost and reliability by a factor of 10 over existing solutions.

A blue globe set against the darkness of space — the final frontier one step closer.

If you didn’t catch the webcast, SpaceX has just made available a video recording of the flight. Here’s a timeline of the mission’s highlights:

• T+0:05 “We have liftoff!”
• T+0:12 “Falcon has cleared the tower”
• T+0:42 Velocity 128 m/s, altitude 2.6 km, guidance nominal.
• T+1:20 Passing through max Q
• T+1:25 Velocity 450 m/s, altitude 13.9 km
• T+2:50 Stage separation, altitude ~90.5km (cheers from the control room)
• T+3:00 “Second stage ignition confirmed”
• T+3:14 Fairing separation
• T+3:27 Velocity 2634 m/s, altitude 117 km
• T+4:14 Velocity 2778 m/s, altitude 161 km
• T+5:03 Video feed cut-off due to a roll control anomaly

There’s also a feature and a lively post-mortem discussion at NASASpaceFlight, detailing the pre-launch drama of the last couple days (including the aborted ignition at T-0 yesterday), and what exactly went wrong in the second stage of the flight today.

Anyway, it looks like 2007 is going to be a major milestone in private spaceflight. SpaceX has two more launches lined up this year, with commercial payloads no less, and I’d be surprised if they couldn’t attain their objective of being the first in the emerging private aerospace industry to achieve low-Earth-orbit payload insertion.

Congratulations are in order to Elon & the team. They are directly partaking in shaping the very future of humanity by getting us back on track to becoming a true spacefaring civilization.