The launch was SpaceX’s fourth launch this year and fifth since December, when it returned the Falcon 9 rocket to flight after a failure last June. It’s SpaceX’s third time it has recovered the vehicle post-launch, and the second time its rocket landed on the droneship at sea.
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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gave a successful landing “maybe even” odds but didn’t seem too anxious about the potential for failure.
2nd stage continuing nominally.
“Woohoo!” SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk wrote on Twitter after the early morning landing at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
A video of the successful Falcon 9 landing follows below.
A live web broadcast showed the first-stage booster touching down vertically early Friday on the barge in the Atlantic, off the Florida coast.
The webscast, which ran for more than an hour, can be viewed here.
The launch continues SpaceX’s comeback from a launch disaster last June in which a Falcon 9 blew up over the ocean.
That meant a three-engine burn was required to return the booster, which re-entered at a faster speed and hotter temperature than its predecessor, conditions that led the company to give the landing a 50 percent chance of success at best.
Musk contends rocket reusability is key to shaving launch costs and making space more accessible.
As reported in Deutsche Welle, the success of the JCSAT-14 was anything but a sure thing, and the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carried minimal fuel levels as a precaution.
Friday’s JCSAT-14 satellite belonged to a Japanese TV station.
Made by Space Systems/Loral in Palo Alto, California, and based on the SSL 1300 series design, the communications craft will use its own power to circularize its orbit at almost 22,300 miles (35,700 kilometers) over the equator in the coming weeks.
The communications satellite will join others already in orbit, bringing the company’s satellites to 17, and will be replacing the JCSAT-2A, which has been in use since 2002. The feat takes Elon Musk’s space company and the aerospace industry as a whole another step closer to low-priced space launches. Or, the company could always try to build a new hangar altogether.
“By tripling the C-band transmission capacity, we will expand the coverage area from Asia, Australia and New Zealand to Russian Federation and the Pacific region, thereby accelerating our efforts to capture global needs”, SKY Perfect JSAT said in a report detailing JCSAT 14’s capabilities.
“Energy is the square of velocity, so four times as much energy is being imparted on the stage”, said SpaceX mechanical design engineer John Federspiel during a webcast of the launch.
Elon Musk said last week that the Hawthorne space company’s first mission to Mars could be as soon as by 2018.
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Before Friday’s launch SpaceX had downplayed expectations for the rocket’s successful return.
