The launch of the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon capsule marked the first time a commercial spacecraft has been sent to the orbiting outpost.

Tracing a fiery arc across the night sky, the rocket lifted off just before 4am local time at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and smoothly boosted the capsule into orbit. The capsule is expected to rendezvous with the space station within days, delivering a half-tonne of provisions for its six crew members.

It is considered just a test flight — in fact, the capsule was packed with only nonessential items, in case something went disastrously wrong — but if all goes well with this mission and others like it, commercial spaceships could be carrying astronauts to and from the space station in three to five years.

“Falcon flew perfectly!!” billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, founder of the SpaceX company, said via Twitter. “Feels like a giant weight just came off my back.”

Musk later told reporters: “For us, it’s like winning the Super Bowl.”

The Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket is seen during a time exsposure as it lifts off from space launch complex 40 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station

Up to now, flights to the space station were something only major governments had done.

The White House offered congratulations.

“Every launch into space is a thrilling event, but this one is especially exciting,” said John Holdren, President Barack Obama’s chief science adviser. “This expanded role for the private sector will free up more of NASA’s resources to do what NASA does best — tackle the most demanding technological challenges in space, including those of human spaceflight beyond low-Earth orbit.”

NASA is looking to the private sector to take over flights to the space station now that the space shuttle has been retired. Several US companies are vying for the opportunity.

“The significance of this day cannot be overstated,” said a beaming NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. “It’s a great day for America. It’s actually a great day for the world because there are people who thought that we had gone away, and today says, ‘No, we’re not going away at all.’”

Flight controllers applauded when the Dragon reached orbit nine minutes into the flight. Then they embraced once the solar panels on the craft popped open. Many of the SpaceX controllers wore untucked T-shirts, jeans or shorts, a stark contrast to NASA’s suit-and-tie shuttle crowd.

A previous launch attempt, on Saturday, was aborted with a half-second left in the countdown because of a bad valve in one of Falcon’s nine engines.

Another important test comes on Thursday when the Dragon draws close to the space station. It will undergo practice maneuvers from more than a mile out. If all goes well, docking will occur on Friday. Musk will preside from the company’s Mission Control in Hawthorne, California.

Since the shuttle’s retirement last summer, American astronauts have been hitching rides to the space station aboard Russian rockets, and Russian, Japanese and European ships have been delivering supplies.

SpaceX has spent more than $US1 billion on the project.

Musk, the 40-year-old entrepreneur who helped create PayPal and runs the electric car company Tesla Motors, has poured in millions of his own fortune, and NASA has contributed $US381 million in seed money in a venture that has been likened to the public-private collaboration that built the internet and won the West.

Even Musk’s rivals were rooting for a successful flight.

“The shuttle may be retired, but the American dream of space exploration is alive and well,” said Mark Sirangelo, chairman of Sierra Nevada’s space systems, which is developing a mini-shuttle to carry space station crews in a few years.

The Dragon capsule will stay at the space station for a week and then splash down in the Pacific, bringing back experiments and equipment. None of the other cargo ships now in use are designed to return safely; they burn up on the way down.

Two more Dragon supply missions are planned this year, regardless of what happens this week.

The rocket also blasted into orbit around the Earth the ashes of more than 300 people, including Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper and actor James Doohan, who played Scotty on Star Trek. The ashes were in a section of the rocket that was jettisoned during the climb into space.

Ballmer described Windows 8 as the “deepest, broadest and most impactful” Windows software ever created by the US tech giant, after the current Windows 7 sold at unprecedented rates to businesses.

“It’s really, in some senses, a dawning of the rebirth of MS Windows… It’s certainly the most important piece of work we’ve done,” he said on Tuesday in a speech to the Seoul Digital Forum.

Windows 8, whose preview version will be released in June, allows users readily to store and share personal data among various devices under the “SkyDrive” cloud computing service. Rival Apple already offers such a service.

The new Microsoft system will support a wider range of devices, including touch- and stylus-based smartphones and tablet PCs as well as desktop and laptop machines, Ballmer said.

The software giant has been trying to expand its presence in the booming software market for smartphones and tablets, which is currently dominated by Apple and Google.

Ballmer predicted that the cloud computing market would become dominated by a few big players.

“The number of core [cloud] platforms, around which software developers will do their innovation, is not ever-broadening,” he said.

“It’s really a quite smaller and focused number – Windows, various forms of Linux, the Apple ecosystem.”

In three to five years from now, “there will be just a few ecosystems that really can get the critical mass”, he said.

Ballmer estimated up to 500 million users will have Windows 8 next year, promising the “best economic opportunity” for device makers and app developers who adopt the new system.

Microsoft will also soon introduce Skype powered by Windows 8, Ballmer said. His company last year bought the leading internet video and voice-calling service for $US8.5 billion.

The timing of Mark Zuckerberg’s marriage to his college sweetheart, Priscilla Chan, on Saturday, just a day after he took his company public, was certainly curious.

Was he looking to clarify his net worth, which, with roughly 503 million shares, now stands at about $US17 billion? And if true, many observers are speculating, did that have to do with the terms of a prenuptial agreement? The Zuckerbergs are not saying.

But what is clear, say matrimonial law experts, is that whatever Zuckerberg earned before the marriage is still solely his property afterwards.

California is one of fewer than a dozen states that follow community property laws, which specifically outline how property is divided between two spouses (or, in some cases, registered domestic partners).

The rest of the states generally follow equitable division rules, where the court tries to divide assets fairly at divorce. Generally, the rule for community property states that anything that was one spouse’s property before marriage is considered separate. In California, this includes things like dividends from previously owned stock or rent that is collected from an income-producing property owned before the marriage. After marriage, anything either partner earns or acquires is considered community property.

“This means the day after the marriage, whatever anyone earns is co-owned by the marital estate,” said Jo Carrillo, a law professor at the University of California Hastings college of law in San Francisco.

But the lines between community and separate property can get fuzzy pretty quickly after that, particularly over many years of marriage. Separate property, for instance, remains separate unless that money is commingled with “community”, or joint, money and the couple does not keep records of where the money came from or who paid what, Carrillo said.

The question in Zuckerberg’s case is whether Chan would be entitled to the growth in value of his Facebook stock.

“The bigger grey area is the growth of value during the marriage,” said Chris Donnelly, head of the family law department at Leland, Parachini, Steinberg, Matzger & Melnick in San Francisco. “That is the 800-pound gorilla, or in Mark Zuckerberg’s case, the 800-tonne gorilla.”

Under normal circumstances, his previously owned stock would remain his separate property. But the fact that Zuckerberg’s job is to continue to contribute to the growth of Facebook – and with it, presumably, the value of its stock – “the fruits of the efforts may accrue to the community,” Donnelly said, adding that it would be hard to imagine that a court would not allocate some portion of that growth to Chan. “She would be entitled to something,” Donnelly said. “It’s a huge grey zone, which is why in California you can create an agreement that spells out property very clearly.”

A prenuptial agreement could, for instance, outline a specific percentage of the growth that would be allocated to the “community” and what might remain separate.

It is unclear whether Zuckerberg gave any shares to his wife at any point. A Facebook spokesman, Larry Yu, declined to comment on whether Chan and Zuckerberg had a prenuptial agreement or whether she received any shares of Facebook stock in her own name before the couple married.

Naturally, Zuckerberg has plenty of assets to protect. But some experts said Chan – who graduated last week from medical school at the University of California, San Francisco – could stand to benefit as well. (The medical school has accepted her into its residency program in pediatrics.) In fact, given that Chan reportedly asked Zuckerberg to sign a relationship agreement before she moved to California several years ago to be with him – outlining issues like how much time they should spend together – it might not be that surprising if she brought up the subject first.

“If she had legal advisers, I would hope they would have encouraged her to also consider a prenup,” Carrillo said. “It protects the non-owning spouse because in California, we have a set of formalities that require the prospective spouses to take some time to negotiate the document, typically with their respective attorneys. The non-owning spouse will get disclosure and know what the other spouse owns and owes, and can choose or not, based on the disclosures, to make decisions.”

Since couples are not required to make prenuptial agreements public, experts said, it is impossible to know if such an agreement even exists. Several matrimonial lawyers said they would be surprised if the Zuckerbergs did not have one. Still, no one raised concerns about how either spouse would fare.

“The nice thing, when you have that much money, is that they are both going to be fine,” said Randall Kessler, chairman of the American Bar Association‘s family law section and a founding partner at Kessler & Solomiany in Atlanta. “Divorce lawyers don’t make our money on people who have that much money. They typically settle their cases.”

Joel Tenenbaum, 28, of Providence, Rhode Island, says he will continue fighting the penalty, despite the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear his appeal and said he’s hoping a federal judge will reduce the amount.

“I can’t believe the system would uphold a six-figure damages amount for downloading 30 songs on a file-sharing system that everybody used,” Tenenbaum said. “I can’t believe the court would uphold something that ludicrous.”

A jury in 2009 ordered Tenenbaum to pay $US675,000, or $US22,500 per song, after the Recording Industry Association of America sued him on behalf of four record labels, including Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Brothers Records.

A federal judge called the penalty unconstitutionally excessive and reduced the award to $US67,500, but the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reinstated it.

The 1st Circuit said a new judge assigned to the case could reduce the award again, but the record labels would then be entitled to a new trial.

Tenenbaum, who said he just graduated Sunday from the university with a doctorate in statistical physics, said he doesn’t have the money to pay the judgment.

“I’ve been working on a graduate student’s stipend for six years now and I have no such money,” he said.

Tenenbaum argued that the U.S. Copyright Act is unconstitutional and that Congress did not intend the law to impose liability or damages when the copyright infringements amount to “consumer copying.”

During the trial, Tenenbaum admitted he downloaded and shared hundreds of songs by Green Day, Nirvana, The Smashing Pumpkins and others. His lawyer suggested the damages should be as little as 99 cents per song, about the same amount Tenenbaum would have to pay for a legal online song purchase.

Lawyers for the recording industry argued that illegal downloading hurt the recording industry by reducing income and profits. A lawyer for the recording labels described Tenenbaum as a “hardcore” copyright infringer. The association said it offered to settle the case for $US5000 early on, but Tenenbaum declined.

“We’re pleased with this decision,” RIAA spokeswoman Cara Duckworth said after the Supreme Court’s announcement Monday.

In the only other music-downloading case against an individual to go to trial, a judge last year reduced the penalty imposed on a Minnesota woman from $US1.5 million to $US54,000. An appeals court has scheduled arguments for next month in the case of Jammie Thomas-Rasset.

Google Chrome just passed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to become the most-used browser in the world, says the latest data from a digital analytics service.

Although Chrome has edged out IE before for short periods, the last week marks the first time Chrome was the No. 1 browser for a sustained period of one week. Exactly 31.88 per cent of the world’s web traffic was done on Chrome, according to StatCounter, while IE is a close second at 31.47 per cent.

Although the difference is slight, Chrome has been trending up for some time, while IE has been trending down. IE is still the top browser in many regions, including North America, but Chrome is extremely popular in both India and South America — the latter being a region where Google’s Orkut social network also has significant market share.

IE is still king in most other regions, though, for obvious reasons: It’s the default web browser for Windows machines, which still constitute about 90 per cent of the world’s computers. Tech-savvy internet users tend to prefer Chrome, however, due to its minimal user interface and loading speed.

The browser trends are expected to continue at least until the general release of Internet Explorer 10 later this year. IE10 is tied to the launch of Windows 8, and it may introduce a wild card into the browser game.

While the desktop version of Windows 8 will support third-party browsers just like Windows has in the past, there’s some question whether certain Windows tablets will limit their functionality, in effect forcing users toward using IE10 if they want the abilities of a full web browser.

While StatCounter’s numbers, which are based on page-view data on 3 million websites, are often seen as a reliable barometer on browser popularity, other services that look at unique visitors to determine market share tell a different story. The most recent numbers from Net Applications, for example, show IE with a commanding lead of 54 per cent to Chrome’s 19 per cent. Mozilla Firefox is slightly more popular, at 20 per cent.

US regulators will investigate Morgan Stanley over its advice to investors in the lead-up to Facebook’s initial public offering.

Allegations are flying that the IPO’s lead underwriter Morgan Stanley told its top clients it had reduced its revenue forecast for the tech giant but did not spread the word to other investors.

The state of Massachusetts has subpoenaed the brokerage firm over its discussions with investors on Facebook.

“The Securities Division has put out a subpoena to Morgan Stanley in connection with the analyst’s discussion with certain institutional investors about the revenue prospects for Facebook,” a spokesman for Massachusetts Secretary of Commonwealth William Galvin said.

This comes amid reports that a senior Nasdaq official said that the index would have pulled the plug on Facebook’s IPO if it had known the extent of technical problems.

It’s reported that Nasdaq’s head of transaction services said the index “by no means would have gone forward” with the IPO if it had known the problems would disrupt a “normal trading day.”

In a separate case, another disgruntled investor is reportedly suing Nasdaq over the trading glitches that caused losses.

The mishandling of the Facebook IPO affected an estimated 30 million shares, according to Nasdaq executives, and losses across Wall Street stemming from the episode have been estimated at tens of millions of dollars.

The shares fell as far as $US30.94, and closed at $US31.12, leaving them 18.1 per cent below the $US38 IPO price.

Shares began to fall sharply in pre-market trade after a report that an analyst from Morgan Stanley trimmed his outlook for the social-network company’s revenue just ahead of the offering.

The analyst downgrade, which Reuters reported was relayed to some of the bank’s major clients as meetings for the IPO were held, came as a surprise to many potential investors so close to the stock’s debut.

Facebook shares tumbled 11 per cent on Monday, giving investors a black eye in the second day of trade since the blockbuster debut on Friday.

Monday’s sell-off came partly because some investors who were allotted more shares than they had expected pared their holdings.

The shares debuted on Friday in a session marred by technology problems that affected trading in millions of shares and ended that day up just 23c.

Nasdaq has faced enormous backlash for allegedly mishandling the listing, as irate brokers and traders demanded the exchange make up losses they blamed on Friday’s technical glitches.

In a brochure mailed last week to its neighbors in the Silicon Valley city, Peter Oppenheimer asked them to write a letter, attend a public meeting, or let the company use their names in support of its building plans, according to one of the people who received it. A response card was included for respondents to express support and comment on the plans.

The brochure included renderings and details of the project, dubbed “Campus 2″, which Apple wants to build and occupy by the end of 2015. The company said in the brochure that Campus 2 would be in addition to its current headquarters, which will remain at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino.

The new building will be made using large panels of glass, like several Apple stores.

Oppenheimer touted the design and the benefits of the new campus, saying “what’s currently a sea of asphalt will be transformed into nearly 120 acres of green space.”

He noted that the 126-acre campus would include wooded walking areas, restaurants and fitness centers, but it would not be open to the public.

The city of Cupertino is due to consider Apple’s plans later this year, Oppenheimer said. In a public hearing on Apple’s plan last September, many residents expressed concerns about the increase in traffic and the impact of construction on the area.

Another view of the new campus…

Apple’s plans call for a single building resembling a massive spaceship that would span 2.8 million square feet and be more than four stories high. It will accommodate up to 13,000 employees. Separate buildings for research would be built nearby and occupy about 300,000 square feet.

Oppenheimer said the benefits to Cupertino residents would be new sidewalks, bike lanes and other street improvements.

A solar power installation is in the plans, and Oppenheimer said Campus 2 would use only renewable power.

Late Apple CEO Steve Jobs talks about his new campus at a Cupertino City Council last year. Photo: AP

Apple bought most of the land for the campus from Hewlett Packard, where late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs got one of his first summer jobs after calling HP founder Bill Hewlett to ask for spare parts.

Jobs had personally shown the architectural plans for the new campus to the Cupertino city council last June, despite being ill at the time.

“It’s a little like a spaceship landed,” Jobs had said of the circular building with its massive interior courtyard.

The Sweden-based popular service – which came to the US in the summer of 2011 – will be bringing its platform of more than 16 million tracks to Australia and New Zealand. The move highlights Spotify’s aggressive growth strategy of expanding into new markets.

Unlike its initial offering in the US which featured only six months of free unlimited access, users in Australia and New Zealand will have full access to Spotify indefinitely.

Those who don’t want any ads can pay $6.99 a month, while the $11.99 a month “Spotify Premium” package includes extra features such as offline listening. 

Although Spotify recently launched in Germany, it has yet to debut in certain regions, including Latin America and Canada. Competitors such as Rdio, which is already popular in Brazil and Canada, and Sony Music Unlimited, which has currently the broadest international availability, are already mainstays in Australia and New Zealand.

It’s obvious that Spotify has its sights set on global growth.