First commercial spacecraft lifts-off on space station supply flight

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- A new era in space travel began on Tuesday as the first private spacecraft lifted-off from Florida designed to rendezvous and dock to the International Space Station.

Built and launched by Space Exploration Technologies or SpaceX, a Falcon 9 rocket delivered a spacecraft loaded with nearly fourteen-hundred pounds of food, water, and clothing into earth orbit destined to resupply earth's orbital outpost.

"I think its great commercial enterprise can take us into space," states David Dundee, lead astronomer at Tellus Science Museum near Atlanta. "I was watching the launch with great interest the whole morning."

It is America's first resupply mission to the complex in ten months as the next generation craft grabs a hold of the torch blazed by the space shuttle era.

Lift-off of the Falcon 9 rocket occurred at 3:44:38 a.m. EDT, on Tuesday soaring into the clear dark skies over Cape Canaveral and toward a rising Sun and the dawn of a new era in space technology.

At launch, the space station was orbiting 249 miles high above the north Atlantic waters.