“I will start with SpaceX, because of its recent successes supplying the ISS – International Space Station”.
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Leaning noticeably due to damage sustained when it landed almost a week ago, the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket returned safely to Port Canaveral this afternoon. These first-stage boosters normally are discarded in the ocean. The rocket was used to deliver the telecommunication satellite into geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) – a high high-elliptical orbit more than 20,000 miles above the Earth, commonly used by a number of satellites.
If there’s one thing that’s holding us back when it comes to space exploration, it’s money, and reusable rockets – like the one SpaceX landed so stunningly over the weekend – can save us a whole lot of it.
Getting to the Martian surface has been the aim of SpaceX and its billionaire founder Elon Musk since the company was formed in 2002.
But the rocket did end up landing on the drone ship successfully, and we now have this unbelievable timelapse footage of the process filmed from a camera on board the rocket. Being able to reuse rockets not only reduces costs; the technology also is key to landing on the Red Planet, where there are no runways and the relatively thin atmosphere makes landings tricky, especially for large masses.
“I think it’s another step toward the stars”, said Musk in a press briefing after the first rocket landing. For the landing, the rocket flips around, uses its engines to slow down and sets down on pop-out legs.
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SpaceX considers the landing experimental, and says that this one was particularly tricky as the mission involved bringing the rocket back at a higher velocity and without as much spare fuel for braking. Three sea landings have followed off Florida’s east coast, first in April, then two more in May. Earlier this year, they announced their plan to send an unmanned lander to Mars by 2018. SpaceX has the capability to transport up to four metric tons of cargo to Mars aboard one of its Falcon 9 rockets.
