On this day in space! June 4, 2010: SpaceX's 1st Falcon 9 rocket reaches orbit

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On June 4, 2010, SpaceX's first Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and successfully reached orbit.

On June 4, 2010, SpaceX's first Falcon 9 rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida and successfully reached orbit, marking a historic first for the private spaceflight company.

SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) was founded in 2002 by billionaire Elon Musk, an internet entrepreneur who co-founded PayPal and leads Tesla Motors.

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches. (Image credit: SpaceX)

The first Falcon 9 almost didn't launch that day — the mission came close to the end of its 4-hour launch window because of an issue with the flight termination system. But SpaceX pulled off a successful launch in time, and the company was able to begin fulfilling its $1.6 billion contract with NASA to deliver cargo to the International Space Station.

For its first test flight, the rocket carried a prototype Dragon spacecraft designed for cargo trips to the International Space Station. SpaceX began official NASA delivery flights with Dragon and Falcon 9 at the end of 2010.

On This Day in Space: See our full 365-day video archive!

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Hanneke Weitering
Hanneke Weitering
Contributing expert

Hanneke Weitering is a multimedia journalist in the Pacific Northwest reporting on the future of aviation at FutureFlight.aero and Aviation International News and was previously the Editor for Spaceflight and Astronomy news here at Space.com. As an editor with over 10 years of experience in science journalism she has previously written for Scholastic Classroom Magazines, MedPage Today and The Joint Institute for Computational Sciences at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. After studying physics at the University of Tennessee in her hometown of Knoxville, she earned her graduate degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting (SHERP) from New York University. Hanneke joined the Space.com team in 2016 as a staff writer and producer, covering topics including spaceflight and astronomy. She currently lives in Seattle, home of the Space Needle, with her cat and two snakes. In her spare time, Hanneke enjoys exploring the Rocky Mountains, basking in nature and looking for dark skies to gaze at the cosmos.