Despite initial delays, the Falcon 9 vehicle, owned by SpaceX, lifted off from its Cape Canaveral launch pad and completed its planned test flight.

It’s an early gauge of the viability of a commercial space program — and a coup for President Barack Obama, who visited SpaceX as he began to make a public case for an overhaul of NASA’s structure and funding earlier this year.

A less successful test launch could have further galvanized congressional opposition to the president’s 2011 NASA budget. That spending plan would shift some of the responsibility for ferrying astronauts into space to commercial space companies — including SpaceX, which completed Friday’s test with the help of a 2008 contract with NASA worth billions.

Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said that the successful test suggests that the vehicle will be in “full operation delivering cargo to the International Space Station a year from now.”

Still, some of the key players in the NASA debate sought to downplay the importance of Friday’s launch, noting that the program itself is still two years behind schedule.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), the ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee and one of the most vocal skeptics of the president’s NASA budget, called the launch a “belated sign” that commercial space flight is possible.

At the same time, she hammered away at Obama’s plant to nix Constellation — the program established by President George W. Bush to return astronauts to the moon and to Mars.

Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, whose state of Alabama is also a NASA stronghold, further decried the launch as a display merely replicating what “NASA accomplished in 1964.”

“Belated progress for one so-called commercial provider must not be confused with progress for our nation’s human space flight program,” Shelby said. “As a nation, we cannot place our future space flight on one fledgling company’s definition of success.”

Overhauling NASA has proved to be a hard slog for the Obama administration and agency Administrator Charles Bolden. The White House has premised its NASA budget on an independent commission’s findings last year that the agency lacks the technology to reach Mars, as the Bush administration sought.

However, recent efforts to rewire the agency to meet its Mars objective have been met with staunch political opposition, especially amid fears that the changes could result in lost jobs ahead of a tough midterm election year. The result has been a series of congressional hearings at which lawmakers have laid into Bolden, even as he stresses the White House plans to devote funds to retraining employees affected by changes in funding levels.

Friday’s launch was not without its kinks: A first attempt to send the rocket to orbit was aborted earlier in the day because of a technical glitch. SpaceX plans to hold a second test later this year, also sponsored by NASA, culminating in a final test launch that would have the vehicle dock at the International Space Station.