Canadian connections to commercial rocket flight to International Space Station

There's a Canadian connection to Tuesday's successful launch of the first private rocket to the International Space Station.

Well, two Canadian connections but one of them is quite literal.

The SpaceX Falcon 9 blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Fla., the starting point for so many historic space missions, in the pre-dawn darkness to deliver a half-tonne of supplies to the space-station, Reuters reported.

In a news release, SpaceX, short for Space Exploration Technologies, said the Dragon capsule would undergo a series of tests to determine if it's ready to dock with the station in a couple of days.

"We obviously have to go through a number of steps to berth with the space station, but everything is looking really good and I think I would count today as a success no matter what happens with the rest of the mission," SpaceX CEO and chief designer Elon Musk said.

Musk tweeted the flight's progress with a sense of elation.

"Falcon flew perfectly! Dragon in orbit, comm locked and solar arrays active!! Feels like a giant weight just came off my back:)" said the 40-year-old entrepreneur, who ploughed his massive payday from developing PayPal into leading-edge technologies such as SpaceX (which also gets funding from NASA) and Tesla Motors.

"Dragon spaceship opens the navigation pod bay door without hesitation. So much nicer than HAL9000 :)" he joked.

Once the Dragon capsule makes its rendezvous with the space station, it will be up to the station's Canadarm2 to grab it and pull it into position for docking, which the Canadian Space Agency calls a cosmic catch.

The robotic arm developed by Vancouver-based MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates, was Canada's most visible contribution to the U.S. space program. It was a key piece of equipment on the now-retired space shuttles and vital to the operation of the massive space station.

Company vice-president Paul Cooper said the station, which is the size of a football field, must keep its distance from remotely controlled supply vehicles.

"You wouldn't want to have any opportunity for there to be a collision," he told the Canadian Press.

"So the easiest way for that to be avoided is to have a plan in which the approach vehicle actually stops before it even touches the space station."

The other Canadian connection is more mythical. Among the paying cargo aboard the flight are canisters with some ashes of 308 people whose family reportedly paid $3,000 each for a "space burial" by a company called Celestis.

Among the space voyagers was actor James Doohan, the Vancouver native famous for his role as Montgomery Scott, chief engineer on the starship Enterprise in the original Star Trek series, Space.com reported.

"We had a Celestis canister on the (Falcon rocket) second stage, not on Dragon," SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell said at a news conference after the launch, according to Space.com.

The Celestis payload included the ashes of Gordon Cooper, an astronaut in NASA's Mercury program.

He and Scotty were supposed to blast into space on an earlier Falcon rocket in 2008 but the flight failed to reach orbit.

This time it appears they reached the final frontier.