The Millennium Falcon 1 [went off course at about T+40 seconds and took a turn in the wrong direction, crash landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Sponsored by one of the now wealthy founders of PayPal, the Falcon 1 design is the first commercial payload-to-orbit system and hoped to undercut NASA costs by 66%.

MJR recently posted an mp3 of a talk he gave on computer engineering and how it can be compared to NASA’s (and specifically Richard P. Feyneman’s) studying space ship engineering which sheds light on the engineering difficulties these folks are trying to overcome.

Pre-launch chatter:

Ben: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/falcon/f1/status.html
Grant: what is that?
Ben: first commercial launch of a payload that isn’t affilicated w/ gov
Grant: oic
Ben: guy who started paypal’s new space company
Grant: lol
Grant: that’s awesome
Grant: if some sf author had that in a cyberpunk book in the 80’s, i’d have considered it laughable
Ben: yea, goal is to send payloads way cheap
Ben: http://spacex.com/
» Space Exploration Technologies Corporation
Grant: “founder of this first-to-launch commercial venture made his fortune founding a company allowing people to pay for things on the “Internet”, a network of computers which :confused: :wtf:...”
Grant: me in 1985: :laugh:
Ben: yea no shit
Ben: or carmack and his rockets
Grant: haha yeah