Here’s why you should care about SpaceX’s successful Falcon 9 rocket landing
SpaceX's Monday launch and subsequent landing of its Falcon 9 rocket marked the company's return to flight after half a year. But it could also be the first step in heralding an age of affordable space transportation.
It's all fire and brimstone baby. (Image Source: SpaceX)
In a time when billionaire owners of tech companies are launching rockets left and right – think Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin – news about the latest successful, or failed, landing may seem par for the course. But SpaceX’s successful landing of the booster stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on Monday is a triumphant demonstration in one key way – it is the start of making space travel truly affordable.
The Falcon 9 rocket in question was actually SpaceX’s return to flight after half a year and two previous failed attempts to land the rocket boosters on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
SpaceX is above all a space transport company, and Monday’s Falcon 9 rocket was carrying a commercial payload comprising 11 small data-relay satellites for Orbcomm. But after the second stage of the rocket containing the satellites had continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around back to Cape Canaveral, where it landed safely just 10 minutes after launch at Landing Zone 1.
Most rockets are currently launched only once, and their boosters fall back to earth as some very expensive junk. But if rockets could be refurbished and reused – the successful landing of the Falcon 9’s booster stage is just the first step – spaceflight could become far more affordable. It currently costs US$10,000 to put a pound of payload in orbit, a prohibitive amount that is a huge barrier to ambitious goals like putting men on Mars.
The refuelling and reuse of rocket booster stages could help change that, but SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has said that it would take a few years for the company to sort through the process of reusing rockets. Yes, after figuring out how to land them, they now have to figure out how reuse them.
The landing was also a success for SpaceX in other ways. For instance, it was a flawless show of SpaceX’s upgraded Falcon 9 rocket, where the company dropped the temperature of its liquid oxygen to around -207°C and kerosene fuel to -7°C to improve performance of its rocket engines.
Source: The New York Times
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