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SpaceX rocket returns to Earth safely
The ORBCOMM-2 Mission carried 11 satellites into low-earth orbit.
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The first stage, which houses most of the fuel and all nine of the rocket’s eponymous engines, was traveling at a speed of almost 3,000 miles per hour (5,000 kilometers per hour) when it separated from the second stage.
“If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred”, Musk said on SpaceX’s website. I can’t quite believe it.
The private space enterprise, headed by entrepreneur Elon Musk, has been trying to build a reusable rocket in an effort to cut space travel costs.
Another commercial spaceflight company has also successfully landed a booster. The Blue Origin rocket that landed upright in November made a much shorter sub-orbital flight.
Before the rocket explosion in June, SpaceX successfully got its rocket back to the ground but watched as it tipped over during the landing attempt. And it was not just practice.
SpaceX has more than 60 launch missions pending worth about US$8 billion. The devices completed a 17-satellite, low-orbiting constellation that will help facilitate communications for Internet of Things devices. Although the rocket reached the booster platform at sea, it did not land perfectly.
That would have been significant enough, coming almost six months after a Falcon launch failure forced SpaceX to hold up on its space missions.
SpaceX is leasing the landing area, a former Atlas missile-launching site, from the Air Force.
While the Falcon 9 landing was “an important” step toward reusable rockets, Pace said, SpaceX engineers still have a lot of work to do. Gen. Wayne Monteith said in a statement.
Blastoff of SpaceX Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on December 21, 2015.
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It’s been a rocky year for SpaceX. Three tries at vertical landings of the first-stage boosters earlier this year failed; in each case, the segment aimed for a modified barge off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida.