The rocket landed intact on the company’s autonomous landing barge “Of Course I Still Love You” in the Atlantic Ocean, after deploying a Japanese communications satellite in a very high orbit above Earth. “United States of America!” chant when a rocket that sent a satellite into orbit successfully landed on a platform in the Atlantic Ocean off Florida’s Space Coast early Friday morning.
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SpaceX made its first successful rocket landing on a droneship in April after launching a cargo ship to the International Space Station.
This is the second time the commercial space company has successfully recovered a rocket at sea and the third rocket landing overall. Even the launch commentator enthusiastically declared, “The Falcon has landed”.
SpaceX’s founder and chief executive, Elon Musk, was even more exuberant.
The booster’s intact recovery gives SpaceX a 3-for-7 record in its vertical landing attempts, which began in January 2015 with a crash landing on the drone ship.
“May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar”, he added.
This could mean that regularly re-using rockets is more feasible in the near future than we thought, which would be a huge boon for space exploration. The latter, albeit being able to successfully land rockets in the past, is much more focused on lower passenger flights – something that is quite far from the orbital payloads of SpaceX. A live webcast displayed the entire launch process. It was carrying the JCSAT-14 satellite for the Japanese telecom company SKY Perfect JSAT Corp.
After separating from the rocket’s second stage, the first stage dropped back to Earth, firing its engines as it re-entered the atmosphere.
The CEO tweeted “Woohoo!!” in bold letters after the Falcon 9 landed. SpaceX has clearly mentioned a number of times that the success chances are now and Musk also talked about the odds.
Today’s Falcon 9 landing is the second within a month for SpaceX.
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Currently, SpaceX is storing its returned rockets at Launch Complex 39A which is a spaceport in Cape Canaveral, Florida that the company leases from NASA. The Falcon Heavy is scheduled for its first test flight sometime later this year; it’s essentially three Falcon 9s strapped together.
