Space X's Falcon 1 reaches orbit!

This will be remembered as the dawn of the era of fast, cheap and reliable commmercial space launch availability:

http://www.spacex.com/F1-004.php

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iF-6npNsKa0n_7aLm8tJvuHWt4JgD93G1LC00

Awesome job Space-X. Congrats! There are many more great moments to come. Falcon 9, COTS demo, first mission to the Space Station, first manned mission to the Space Station, and then ofcourse missions to Mars. The odds of those happening have suddenly increased a lot today.

Comment: Has Space-X already shown that they can provide a reliable, fast availability and low-cost orbital launch system?

With this successful launch, they have already proven the cost effectiveness and speed to a great extent and silenced the naysayers- in a couple of 100 million dollars, 500 people (only now they have hit a strengthof 500) and 6 years, they have developed and built two rockets from scratch (Falcon 9 is being manufactured right now), designed Dragon, and launched Falcon-1 4 times. Also note the fast turnaround time forFalcon-1 launches. For the same scale of development and testing effort, NASA would have taken 10 billion dollars or more and 10s ofthousands of employees. Just to make minor modifications to the existing tanks and engines to transform them into Ares 1 and 2 has already cost NASA a few billion dollars, and is expected to take almosta decade. All the other supposedly private companies in orbitalspace services such Sea Launch, Mir Corp, SpaceAdventures, Orbital Sciences, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Arianne, have been doled out billions of dollarsand/or massive man-power and logistics suppor from the government to develop what they did, or have reused previously existing government-funded infrastructureto provide their "new" service.

Only two other companies come close to Space-X in the area of space services: Bigelow Aerospace and Space Dev- and they both are NOT working on orbital launch capabilties (as of now). They both do complement Space-X's launch capabilties - and hopefully will one day provide cheap space stations and a large group of paying astronauts (respectively) to Space-X.