SpaceX will unveil the Dragon V2, its new spaceship that will be able to carry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, tonight at 7 p.m. Pacific. Watch Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of SpaceX and Tesla, reveal the new ship at the company's California headquarters on the livestream above.

The Dragon V2 is a modified version of the Dragon spacecraft that has performed three unmanned resupply missions to the Space Station since October 2012. The third mission returned to Earth earlier this month.

NASA hopes the new vessel will be ready for manned missions by 2017 or 2018. Earlier this year, the U.S. extended its Space Station program through 2024. But since the Space Shuttle program was retired in 2011, the only way to get astronauts to the ISS has been on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. A Soyuz vehicle just delivered a fresh crew yesterday that included U.S. astronaut Reid Wiseman, whose seat on the ship cost the U.S. more than $70 million. Recently the situation became even less appealing when Russia threatened to stop taking Americans to the ISS altogether in retaliation for U.S. sanctions against Russia in the wake of Russia's actions in Ukraine.

Two other companies, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corp., also have contracts with NASA to build vehicles to shuttle astronauts, but SpaceX may have an advantage. They are basically tricking out their current Dragon capsule with thrusters that will give the crew the ability to abort by separating from the its rocket if something goes wrong.

Those thrusters, which the company named SuperDracos, fired up and passed qualification tests earlier this week (see video below).