Did you hear that? They've shut down the main reactor. We'll be destroyed for sure. This is madness!

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket is now vertical at Cape Canaveral and should launch in the next month or so on it's maiden flight. After a few tries their Falcon 1 rocket was the first private rocket to reach orbit successfully (see the video).
Elon Musk is the CEO of the company. Even if you don't know his name, you know what he did - he co-founded PayPal. Seems that a lot of these computer guys are going into rocketry. John Carmack from ID Software (Remember Doom and Quake?) wih Armadillo Aerospace, Paul Allen with his funding for Scaled Composites, and even Jeff Bezos of Amazon is getting into the space business with Blue Origin.
Anyway, I just liked the comment that "Olaf" made on Universe Today about the Falcon 9, saying how it resembled the back end of Princess Lea's ship with all those engines, so I had to find some comparison photos. I just had to throw in some more information about this since there is so much more behind the photo!

| Space X |