Commercial space company SpaceX has had a long road to this morning’s launch to the International Space Station. The mission, originally planned months ago, has seen repeated delays and a frustrating automatic abort earlier this week. Today’s launch seemed to make up for all of that, when the Falcon 9 rocket lifted flawlessly off the launchpad, carrying the Dragon spacecraft into orbit. 

Blast off of the first SpaceX mission to the International Space Station starts in just a few minutes! See the livestream, after the break.

It’s been nearly a year in the making, but SpaceX’s historic mission to the International Space Station is on track to begin tomorrow with the blast off of its Dragon spacecraft. The unmanned mission will be a historic first for the company, and will no doubt become a touchstone as we enter the age of commercial space flight. Also, there will be an awesome rocket launch.

While there is plenty of high-quality footage showing the drama of a Space Shuttle liftoff, less attention has been paid to recreating the experience of witnessing the event first hand. YouTube user Indiegun spliced together the best blastoff footage around, and then went the extra mile by optimizing the audio to give viewers the stomach-vibrating feeling of being near a rocket launch. Indiegun says that the goal was to share the experience of watching a Shuttle launch to those who could never see it first hand. On our behalf: Thanks.

In the run up to the launch of North Korea’s Unha-3 rocket and the satellite it carried, there was a surprising amount of candor from the isolated nation’s government. The public and foreign press were invited to view the rocket on the launchpad, and some journalists even toured the control room that would organize the launch. It would all prove in vain as minutes after today’s lift off, the rocket’s second stage failed to ignite and the spacecraft crashed into the Yellow Sea.

While a lot of attention is being focused on the advances made by commercial spaceflight companies, NASA is working hard toward a test flight of their Orion spaceship in 2014. Orion, which is specifically designed to take astronauts beyond low Earth orbit to targets like asteroids and Mars, is probably one of the most important projects in human spaceflight at the moment. Highlighting the upcoming flight test — called Exploration Flight Test (EFT-1) — is a video from NASA, which gives us a vivid first look at this vital test mission.

Back in October, China took its space operations to new heights by placing the Tiangong-1 space lab in orbit. Then, the Chinese space agency followed up that success by launching the unmanned Shenzhou-8 craft in November, which successfully docked with the Tiangong-1 station. Now, final preparations are underway for the country’s first manned mission to its space station, and the crew roster may for the first time include some women.

NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory, called Curiosity, blasted off today from Cape Canaveral, FL atop an Atlas V rocket on its way to Mars. The ambitious mission will place the most advanced space rover yet conceived on the red planet, in hopes of discerning whether Mars has ever been home to microbial life. Following today’s successful 10 AM launch, the rover will cruise to Mars arriving in August 2012.

See video of this morning’s launch, after the break.

Late last night, the first manned Soyuz rocket blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome on the plains of Kazakhstan, headed for the International Space Station. With traditional Russian badassery, the launch took place in the midst of a massive snow storm. While trips to the ISS have become rather hum-drum news, the crash of an unmanned Progress resupply ship in August kept the international space community on edge for weeks.

But as @AngryBirds revealed, the rocket was carrying more than just astronauts.

In late September, China successfully placed Tiangong-1 space station into orbit, paving the way for future missions. The first of those missions began today with the launch of Shenzhou-8, an unmanned mission which will dock with the Tiangong station after two days of travel time. This will be the first docking maneuver for China, and if successful, will place it among only three countries that have carried out such a mission.

While these accomplishments are modest compared to Russia and the United States — which began long term space habitation and docking activities in the 1960s — it is a major step for China. Moreover, it demonstrates to the world that China is taking its space program seriously, and could be something of an embarassment for the U.S. which currently has no domestic manned spaceflight capability.

Should Shenzhou-8 perform as expected, the next step will be for manned missions to the station. We’ll have to wait until 2012 to see how those go.