Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Makes Aerospace History With Successful Launch, Landing of a Used Rocket (theverge.com)
Eloking quotes a report from The Verge: After more than two years of landing its rockets after launch, SpaceX finally sent one of its used Falcon 9s back into space. The rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, this evening, sending a communications satellite into orbit, and then landed on one of SpaceX's drone ships floating in the Atlantic Ocean. It was round two for this particular rocket, which already launched and landed during a mission in April of last year. But the Falcon 9's relaunch marks the first time an orbital rocket has launched to space for a second time. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk appeared on the company's live stream shortly after the landing and spoke about the accomplishment. "It means you can fly and refly an orbital class booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket. This is going to be, ultimately, a huge revolution in spaceflight," he said. "It's been 15 years to get to this point, it's taken us a long time," Musk said. "A lot of difficult steps along the way, but I'm just incredibly proud of the SpaceX for being able to achieve this incredible milestone in the history of space."
Actually, the next milestone is rapid reuse :) Tweet from Musk this evening:
SpaceX has a backlog. It'll be nice to see if they can really up their launch rate and clear it all out.
Kneel Before Christ!
Excellent advice when you have an author looking after your interests who will ensure things work out in the end. But in real life, if you believe that, you should get to work on your perpetual motion machine now.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Baby steps man. Baby steps. The future isn't coming overnight.
Funny. Ancient Athens did not have lawyers. They still had trials and courts and arbitration. Each side of a case represented himself. You don't need lawyers when the law is simple and short enough for the common citizen to understand.
F9 boosters are only travelling at about 2,300 m/s (64km AMSL) at MECO, compared to the space shuttle's 8,200 m/s (120km ASML) during reentry, so it's understandable that more work needed to be done to get the space shuttle flying again. Personally, I think you should be comparing the F9 booster rebuild to the SRB recovery and rebuild - what SpaceX are doing there is order of magnitude more complex.
That said, there's no real point in comparing the two - they don't have much in common apart from the fact they're both launch systems.