The headline pretty much says it all: SpaceX, the commercial spaceflight company that’s leading the pack with its amazing Falcon boosters and Dragon spacecraft, plans to finally reveal its human-rated version of the Dragon in a live webcast this evening at 7 PM Pacific time. This variant of the existing Dragon design will reportedly have seating for seven astronauts, a major step up from the three-person Soyuz capsules that have been ferrying personnel to and from the ISS since the space shuttles were retired three years ago. And it couldn’t come at a better time, either, considering the impact that the current diplomatic tensions between the U.S. and Russia is having on our joint space operations.

I confess, I still miss the sight and the runway-landing concept of my beloved shuttles — as an aside, I’m looking forward to the first orbital flight of the shuttle-like DreamChaser being developed by Sierra Nevada Corp., currently planned for 2016 — but those guys at SpaceX have become heroes of mine with their rapid string of successes. Remember that this company designs and builds most of its own hardware in-house, and that it’s only been around for 12 years. In that time, it’s gone from square one to operating a field-tested, reusable, reliable spacecraft and booster system, a pretty remarkable achievement any way you look at it. And Elon Musk, the company’s founder, seems to have a strong and audacious vision for the future, with talk of sending humans to Mars and the company’s exploration into landing spacecraft on their tails like the old-fashioned movie rocketships of the 1950s. This is all potentially very exciting stuff… we may still get that spacegoing future we once believed in…