The Falcon 9 Rocket Did In Fact Blast Off Awesomely on Friday

At long last, after embarrassing anyone stupid enough to make a joke comparing his sexual prowess to a 180-foot-tall, 333-ton rocket ship and then embed a live video feed so everyone could watch the thing sit idle on launch pad for FOUR HOURS while the engineers were, I don’t know, fumbling with a condom wrapper or something, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 finally (finally!) blasted into the air above Cape Canaveral at 2:45 Friday afternoon.

The clip really is pretty cool to watch, especially at the beginning, when a giant wasp attacks the video camera right before lift-off, and at the end, when the second stage detonation sends the nose cone (which is called “Dragon”) into orbit 255 miles in the sky-an event we see from the nose cone’s perspective. What’s more, the successful launch, which marks a big step toward a future when private companies will send missions to deliver cargo and even astronauts into space (and buy the moon or whatever), led to numerous reports of UFO sightings in eastern Australia, where people were startled to see a “a ‘huge revolving moon’ with a swirl in the middle, or an illuminated cloud moving high and fast above the horizon” just before dawn.

Here’s what it looked like there. (Very similar to the “vortex” UFO filmed over Norway in December).