American space shuttles and Russian Soyuz ships have docked with the International Space Station (ISS) any number of times, but until last May, a guy named Elon had never done it. Elon is Elon Musk, the founder of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation—or SpaceX. And while he’s no space traveler himself, his Dragon spacecraft became the first-ever private ship to dock with the ISS, beginning a scheduled dozen unmanned resupply missions, with plans for manned missions to follow. If Musk does launch crews—he says it will happen by 2015—the long-discussed and always-deferred manned commercial conquest of space will at last have begun.