Musk and Bezos-entrepreneurs now joined in a billionaires’ space race for rocket reusability-have jousted on social media about the successful landings and which company has achieved more.
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A historic moment was repeated on Monday, when Elon Musk’s SpaceX landed the first stage of a rocket on its launch pad in Cape Canaveral.
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Much of the hype around reusable rocketry focuses on how much money we could save by not having to rebuild these things all the time – the Falcon 9, for example, cost upwards of $60 million to build, according to the SpaceX website.
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After a challenging year, SpaceX has returned to flight with an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket that successfully performed the company’s long-time goal of landing the first stage after delivering a payload to orbit.
SpaceX has experimented with landing rockets on a barge in the ocean and three attempts had been unsuccessful. SpaceX has “quite a big flight manifest” with more than 12 launches scheduled for 2016, he noted, and “sometime next year we ought to aim to re-fly one of the rocket boosters”.
Last month, Jeff Bezos’ space company also landed a first stage on land.
The mission, capped by delivery of all 11 satellites to orbit for launch customer ORBCOMM, unfolded in just over 30 minutes. Welcome to the club! The updated Falcon 9 V1.1 features super-cooled liquid oxygen propellant, an additional 1.2 meters of height, and the use of full-thrust Merlin engines, which have enabled the return capabilities of the Falcon 9 first stage to its launch site.
Those savings could be passed on to the companies hitching rides on those rockets, like those making weather and communications satellites – if it doesn’t cost too much to get the rockets up and running again. Orbcomm originally signed to launch its OG2 satellites on multiple Falcon 1s for $42.6 million. Bezos’s congratulatory tweet had enough catty snark to be amusing: “Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage”.
The latest rocket launched by SpaceX named Falcon 9 v1. Instead the agency has focused on “monster rockets” like the Space Launch System, which will cost billions of dollars and can be used only once, he said. “Improved weather conditions that night had given SpaceX a 10 percent better chance of a successful landing with the Falcon 9 returning in a ‘recoverable state”. But then he heard from mission control that the booster was standing, in one piece.
Across the country, SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success.
If rocket stages can be refurbished and relaunched, the cost of travelling to space could be greatly reduced, Musk has said. “No one has ever brought an orbital class booster back intact”.
Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies at Teal Group, told Via Satellite that it was no surprise SpaceX would continue nonplussed by Blue Origin’s accomplishment.
SpaceX has plans for a Falcon 9 Heavy that will increase the payload by about double (it depends if it’s in low-Earth orbit or farther).
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The broad concept is the same as it was for the Space Shuttle: If you want to make space travel cost-effective, the vehicle needs to be reusable.
