When SpaceX made the first ever “land landing” of their Falcon 9 rocket booster on Monday night, social media was flooded with footage of the event and with congratulations to Elon Musk and his entire team.
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SpaceX is led by Elon Musk, the billionaire founder of Tesla Motors.
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The launch and landing was the company’s first attempt since June, during which a previous rocket exploded mid-flight.
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Musk, having attempted to land the Falcon 9 several times at the beginning of the year, which ended in “rapid unscheduled disassembly” and other euphemisms for explosions, responded in kind with “clarifications” over the scale of Bezos’s achievement. Although the SpaceX landing is certainly also a “sub-orbital” flight – as the rocket booster did not make a full revolution around the planet – the Falcon 9 first stage reached higher and flew much faster than New Shepard, making the SpaceX landing far more challenging. For the latest launch, the rocket stage flew to about 75 kilometers before turning around, leaving the rest of the rocket to deliver a package of satellites into low-Earth orbit.
On that occasion an unmanned Falcon-9 broke apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with debris tumbling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean. Once it leaves Earth’s atmosphere, the first stage separates after its nine rockets burn for around 162 seconds with 1.5 million pounds of thrust.
Livestreams from SpaceX’s headquarters showed employees breaking into cheers as the rocket touched down at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida. The industry now loses many millions of dollars in discarded machinery and sophisticated rocket components after each launch.
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SpaceX has come close to landing a rocket but until now, never actually pulled the feat off. Blue Origin, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, just landed the first reusable rocket but Musk pointed out that was a suborbital trip, the requirements for which are considerably different.
