On the afternoon of 4 June 2010, a slender white rocket rose from Cape Canaveral’s Space Launch Complex 40 and punched through the Florida clouds, carrying with it the hopes of a fledgling company and a radical new vision for access to space. Space Exploration Technologies—SpaceX—had been founded by Elon Musk in 2002 with a handful of engineers and a determination to slash the cost of reaching orbit. The Falcon 9’s maiden flight placed a Dragon qualification unit into a near-perfect 250-kilometre orbit, validating a two-stage, liquid-fuelled launcher built almost entirely with private capital and NASA milestone payments. It was the first time a privately developed vehicle of that scale had achieved Earth orbit from American soil, and it opened the door to a commercial resupply era that would soon see Dragon capsules berthing with the International Space Station. The Falcon 9 family has since flown hundreds of missions, but that first ascent remains the spark that proved entrepreneurial rocketry could compete with government programmes—and win.