A privately developed liquid fuel rocket successfully entered the Earth orbit on Sunday night, ushering in what the private sector space industry hopes will be a new dawn of spaceflight. ‘Falcon 1’ was launched at 4:15 p.m. PST on Sunday, from the Reagan Test Site on Omelek Island, nearly 2,500 miles southwest of Hawaii in the Pacific Ocean.

Designed specifically for the test mission, by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation (SpaceX), founded by Elon Musk, ‘Falcon 1’ is carrying a simulated payload, a hexagonal aluminum alloy chamber that weighs 364 pounds and stands about 5 feet tall. For power, the rocket relies on Merlin, a gas generator cycle kerosene engine developed by SpaceX from an injector system used in the Apollo Moon program's lunar module landing engine. Merlin provides 125,000 pounds of thrust at sea level.

Since the company’s three previous launches had failed, Musk declared that the moment was “awesome.” He thanked his employees at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California, and said: “We’ve made orbit!” He also added: “Fourth time’s the charm.”

The 37-year-old Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, after selling the online payment company he helped found, PayPal, to eBay for $1.5 billion. The company, with more than 500 employees, captured one of the most coveted prizes of the new space industry: a commercial orbital transportation services (Cots) contract worth as much as $100 million. This program encourages private-sector alternatives to the space shuttle.

The stated aim of SpaceX is to develop a new series of space vehicles to “reduce the cost and increase the reliability of space access by a factor of ten.” The company is developing a larger rocket, ‘Falcon 9’, to provide cargo services to the International Space Station for NASA after the shuttle program winds down in 2010. The company also hopes to adapt its technology to carry people to the station, which could help bridge the gap until the debut of the next generation of NASA spacecraft, planned for 2015.

No wonder after the successful launch of ‘Falcon 1’, Musk told his team: “This is just the first step in many.”