At 3:44 AM EDT Elon Musk and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 finally blasted off the launchpad today and began what may be a new era in spaceflight. For the SpaceX team, it had been a long and bumpy road to get to this point. Several setbacks pushed the launch date deep into May. At the last possible moment on a launch attempt last Saturday morning, the sequence was aborted when a pressure discrepancy was spotted by the computer in the number five Merlin 1C engine.

Today, however, things went off without a hitch.

After the launch and separation, NASA and the SpaceX crew watched as the Dragon supply and crew module successfully separated from the Falcon 9 rocket and deployed its solar array, another enormous milestone for the program.

Today kicks off a roughly two-week mission for the Dragon module that, if all goes well, will lead to the first docking between the International Space Station and a private space vessel. In the macro view, a successful Falcon 9 and Dragon program means that NASA has a much more affordable crew and cargo transport vehicle that frees them from dependency on the Russian Soyuz. Success could even mean that NASA has the freedom to work on something even greater, perhaps a heavy launch vehicle that can deliver crew and cargo beyond low Earth orbit.