What you’re seeing here is the lower stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket land on a drone barge minutes after lifting off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
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The 156-foot-tall booster, slowed by one of its Merlin rocket engines, descended to the football field-sized vessel about 8 minutes, 35 seconds after liftoff.
And today NASA helped another company into the private spaceflight game, launching an experimental inflatable space capsule that will be attached to the International Space Station. As usual, SpaceX will try to land the leftover booster on an ocean barge, as a way to shave launch costs.
The SpaceX team had a single-second launch window on the mission and had lofted almost 7,000lb (3,175kg) of supplies and scientific experiments for the crew on the International Space Station. The largest single payload, accounting for almost half the cargo mass on this mission, is the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM), a prototype expandable module developed by Bigelow Aerospace that will be installed on the station for testing.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stands ready for launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Friday, April 8, 2016 as photographers set up remote cameras. The company hopes to launch two of the B330s around 2020, providing opportunities for companies, schools, countries outside the space mainstream, and NASA, too, if it likes. This is a fabric room NASA envisions astronauts will be able to set and pack up easily. If punctured, BEAM is created to slowly compress, ensuring that it doesn’t pose any danger to the space station. Inflated, it will be about 13 feet long (4 meters) and 10½ feet (3 meters) in diameter, and provide 565 cubic feet (16 cubic meters) of space, about the size of a small bedroom. It will be big enough for a crew member to enter.
After two years, BEAM will be cut loose, eventually burning up on re-entry. “Chances are people will say a Kevlar vest”, he said, commenting on how the structure will protect against small space debris. Bigelow Aerospace has already tested two other expandable habitats in orbit, without human occupants. The company’s founder and CEO Robert Bigelow, who made his fortune from the hotel chain Budget Suites, hopes that the habitat’s technology could be used for research and tourism trips to other planets in our solar system someday.
The plan is for NASA to turn low Earth orbit over to commercial companies so that NASA could focus on deep space missions.
Lab mice for experiments and lettuce seeds for growing at the orbiting outpost were also included in the spacecraft, which should arrive at the International Space Station early Sunday.
NASA, meanwhile, imagines inflatable modules at Mars awaiting astronauts traveling in the traditional Orion spacecraft that is hooked up with inflatable compartments to ease the eight-month, one-way journey.
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But that’s not all. This includes samples collected during NASA’s one-year mission, where now-retired American astronaut Scott Kelly spent 340 days in space.
