Slashdot Mirror
SpaceX Enters a New Stage of Reusability (mashable.com)
SpaceX will now be attempting to land and reuse all of the rockets it launches. Over the weekend, SpaceX launched and successfully landed its second Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida. An anonymous reader writes: The landing of this vehicle, designed with reusability in mind, marks the beginning of a completely recyclable era of rockets for the company. The Block 5 can be used hundreds of times if recovered successfully. Now that the company has transitioned to this more reusable model, recovery will be an even more crucial part of the launch. In a two week period, it's planning five recoveries. Mashable: The landing marks one of the first landings and launches of the company's newest, upgraded Falcon 9 rockets, called Block 5. Before this launch, SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth. That type of launch without landing is the traditional way of getting things to orbit, but SpaceX managed to change that. The whole point in the company's rocket landings hinge on the fact that it could reduce the cost of flying to orbit. By reusing rocket stages for multiple launches, it could drive down the exorbitant cost of flying to space for companies and nations around the world. SpaceX has been killing it the past couple years. The company -- founded by Elon Musk -- launched 18 times in 2017.
>> SpaceX has been killing it
Not sure you're old enough to remember deaths involved in space flight, but this may not be the smartest statement for the marketeers to put out.
Those Block 4 first stages did land albeit on the bottom of the ocean.
Sig?
Aaaaaaaand....
The GGP post was right. It took only two posts.
By that time human beings will be spread out among the Universe and will have developed into many different species. SpaceX is just the start of that.
If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material. Lighter than spider silk, but strong enough to lift massive load, yet conveniently fragile enough to burn up in the atmosphere. Now you just have to invoke for it the ability to provide free energy and we can call it unobtanoum!