Maybe one day it will be routine — so boring, as Elon Musk has said, that it will no longer be newsworthy. But for now his attempts to launch and then land rockets are still dramatic, as exciting as sporting events. On Friday evening, SpaceX pulled off another stunning landing, on a ship 422 miles off the Florida coast.
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted up from Cape Canaveral at 5:39 p.m., carrying a Thaicom commercial communications satellite to orbit. Given the distance the rocket had to travel to deliver its payload, SpaceX hedged on the success of the return, stating that “the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging.”
But then video showed the rocket screaming back from space, its engines firing to slow it down. And then cameras from the ship showed it standing triumphantly once again.
Over the past few years, Musk’s space company has been perfecting the difficult art of landing rockets so they can be reused, instead of being ditched into the ocean as had been the practice since the 1960s-era Apollo program.
Ahead of Friday’s launch, which was postponed from Thursday after Musk said there was a “tiny glitch” with the rocket’s upper stage, SpaceX had pulled off landings three times. First, it landed a stage at Cape Canaveral in December. Then it followed with two landings at sea this spring. The rocket in that last landing “took max damage, due to v high entry velocity,” Musk tweeted this month.
Lauren Lyons of SpaceX said the conditions of the day’s landing were similar to those earlier this month, when the rocket touched down with just three seconds’ worth of propellant left in its tank. During that landing, the rocket went from traveling at some 3,915 mph when it hit the atmosphere to 2.5 mph when it landed just off the bull’s eye. That showed that such a high-velocity landing is “not impossible,” she said.
Musk said he thought it would improve his chances of eventually getting to Mars, his ultimate goal. 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.
The company has announced that it plans to land an unmanned capsule on Mars as soon as 2018. This is an ambitious timeline, especially given that its Falcon Heavy rocket, which would carry the spacecraft, is not scheduled to have its maiden flight until later this year.
SpaceX, based in Hawthorne, California, has become a major force in the space industry, with more than 4,000 employees, a backlog of orders to launch commercial satellites, and multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to fly cargo and eventually astronauts to the International Space Station.
The Thaicom 8 satellite it delivered was made by Orbital ATK and is to serve Thailand, India and African countries.
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