Good news for people who want to get off the planet. SpaceX has announced a new iteration of their Falcon line of launch vehicles, the Falcon IX.

Faithful readers may recall that I've been touting their Falcon I for some little while now. They may also recall that SpaceX is using private funding to engineer a launcher that is both more reliable and less expensive than any of the the current stable of commercial launchers.

One way they will do this is by avoiding that particular abomination known as "cost plus" contracting, a sensible thing to do when spending your own money.

Given that no Falcon has even flown yet, announcing the IX may strike some folks as being premature, but I'm not one of them. How I hate naysayers.

Falcon I should make its maiden flight within the next thirty days or so, and I wish them nothing but good luck. If Elon Musk can pull this off, they should name a Lunar crater after him, at the very least. Slashing the cost of access to space by two thirds (or more) is such a self-evidently vital thing to do, you wish it had happened twenty years ago. It's long overdue.

Here's the SpaceX Falcon overview page. Scroll down for a "usual suspects" depiction of their projected product line. Beautiful, aren't they? I sure hope they get past the pixelware stage.

For analysis with more depth than you'll get from lazy me, check out this post at Selenian Boondocks. Jon Goff raises some interesting questions and gets answers from a surprisingly authoritative source. He also raises a really cute baby.

For truly dedicated Falcon watchers, a fine blog for that purpose would be Daniel Schmelzer's Carried Away. Lately he seems to be on a SpaceX roll, for which I'm duly appreciative. Sometimes getting carried away is a good thing.

If Mr. Musk is wildly successful in his rocket enterprise, I hope that he will consider diversifying. The world needs a good flying car, and a man needs a hobby. A Mars colony would be nice too.