After four failed attempts at landing a rocket on a drone ship, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally managed to pull of this feat with their Falcon 9 on Saturday.
Advertisement
SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform.
Coupled with the successful recovery of a Dragon 9 booster stage on land on 21 December, SpaceX has now demonstrated the basic feasibility of recovering the first stage of any rocket launch, whether the payload is meant to be lofted to low-earth orbit, geostationary orbit or proceed to the Moon or another planet, such as Mars. SpaceX has successfully landed a Falcon 9 on the ground before, but landing in the middle of the ocean on a tiny floating barge is a much trickier achievement.
The Dragon and inflatable room should reach the space station on Sunday.
President Obama hailed the latest accomplishment and congratulated Musk and NASA for their hard work and innovation on Twitter, by saying, “Congrats SpaceX on landing a rocket at sea”.
“The rocket landed instead of putting a hole in the ship or tipping over”, Musk told reporters at the Kennedy Space Center a short time lafter the landing. The new experiments arriving to the station will help investigators study muscle atrophy and bone loss in space, use microgravity to seek insight into the interactions of particle flows at the nanoscale level and use protein crystal growth in microgravity to help in the design of new drugs to fight disease.
Roughly a month after its arrival, astronauts aboard the space station will inflate BEAM with pressurized air, increasing its volume to about the size of a small bedroom. NASA’s other commercial shipper, Orbital ATK, made a delivery at the end of March, then Russian Federation just last weekend.
So, while the second stage of the rocket carried on to the International Space Centre with the Dragon spacecraft, the first stage was guided through a series of manoeuvres before it could land successfully – which the engineers and scientists managing the process were not fully certain of.
SpaceX plans to plans to start launching rockets about every two weeks from its sites in Florida and California later this year as the company tackles satellite-delivery orders worth some $10 billion, company officials said. This space mobile housed the Dragon cargo capsule which is now on its way to the International Space Station with essentials for the crew there.
During its two-year test mission, astronauts will enter the module for a few hours several times a year to retrieve sensor data and assess conditions. Asked about the unbelievable success of this launch and recovery, Musk said, “We’re a bit like the dog who caught the bus; now what?”
Advertisement
On the eve of the launch, Bigelow said the mission promises to “change the entire dynamic for human habitation”.
