For the second month in a row, the aerospace company landed a rocket on an ocean platform, this time following the launch of a Japanese communications satellite.
Advertisement
Tonight’s launch was one of those occasions: Because the JCSAT-14 telecommunications satellite had to go into geosynchronous transfer orbit, more than 22,000 miles up, there was very little propellant to spare.
The satellite named JCSAT-14 was launched with the Falcon 9 rocket at around 1:21 a.m. on May 6 in Florida.
To date, SpaceX is the only company to successfully return a rocket from orbit-first on solid ground, in December 2015, then in the ocean this spring.
The rocket delivered a satellite to orbit for a Japanese television and communications company called SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation. SpaceX is scheduled to launch as many as 45 additional missions this year alone.
The days of huge ocean fireballs seem long gone for Elon Musk and SpaceX.
As a result, the first stage of the Falcon 9, which SpaceX still plans to attempt to land on its drone ship “will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing unlikely”, the company said in a statement.
This is the case because Musk and SpaceX want to bring down the cost of space flight dramatically, and the only way to do that is to make rockets reusable. Four previous attempts had failed. Today’s first stage had to burn more fuel compared to the rocket used during the April 8 launch, when SpaceX stuck the droneship landing.
Entrepreneur Elon Musk created SpaceX – or Space Exploration Technologies – as a launch service that would be able to offer much lower rates than competitors with the simple sounding yet hard to achieve strategy of reusing the rockets.
The unmanned SpaceX rocket blasted off from Florida early this morning to put the communications satellite into orbit, with the launch vehicle’s main-stage booster completing a quick return landing on the floating platform.
In the meantime, as Musk wrote on Twitter, he “may need to increase size of rocket storage hangar”.
Advertisement
Musk said last week that SpaceX’s first mission to Mars could be less than two years away.
