A Life Aloft
Well-Known Member
CAPE CANAVERAL — “The Falcon has landed.”
It may not top the Eagle’s 1969 moon landing, but SpaceX’s confirmation Monday night that it successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket booster at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station could be remembered as a historic turning point in rocketry.
It marked the first time a large rocket has delivered spacecraft to orbit and returned to Earth intact, so that it could potentially fly again.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs see reusable rockets as the key to dramatically reducing the cost of access to space, which could enable more missions and make exploration as far as Mars a more realistic goal.
The 230-foot Falcon 9 blasted off from Launch Complex 40 at 8:29 p.m. ET, rumbling aloft with 1.5 million pounds of thrust and carrying 11 commercial satellites to begin its return to flight after a June 28 launch failure.
About two-and-a-half minutes later, the 14-story first stage dropped away and began the first of three engine burns sending it back toward a concrete pad at SpaceX’s “Landing Complex 1” at the Cape, the former Launch Complex 13.
Observers along the Space Coast and beyond could see rocket engines firing in darkness as the booster descended from as high as 124 miles up and slowed its fall from hypersonic speed.
A loud “boom” could be heard shortly after touchdown a few miles down the coast from where the booster had lifted off, but camera images showed it upright.
The Falcon had landed.
Thousands of employees at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., erupted in cheers and chants of “USA, USA!”
Cheers also rang out at Kennedy Space Center, where hundreds of people associated with Orbcomm Inc., whose 11 satellites were on top of the rocket’s upper stage and still headed toward space, were gathered to watch.
The cheers continued as all 11 satellites were deployed safely in orbits about 500 miles up, ensuring that the day’s primary mission was a success for the publicly traded provider of machine-to-machine communications, an industry sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things."
It may not top the Eagle’s 1969 moon landing, but SpaceX’s confirmation Monday night that it successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket booster at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station could be remembered as a historic turning point in rocketry.
It marked the first time a large rocket has delivered spacecraft to orbit and returned to Earth intact, so that it could potentially fly again.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs see reusable rockets as the key to dramatically reducing the cost of access to space, which could enable more missions and make exploration as far as Mars a more realistic goal.
The 230-foot Falcon 9 blasted off from Launch Complex 40 at 8:29 p.m. ET, rumbling aloft with 1.5 million pounds of thrust and carrying 11 commercial satellites to begin its return to flight after a June 28 launch failure.
About two-and-a-half minutes later, the 14-story first stage dropped away and began the first of three engine burns sending it back toward a concrete pad at SpaceX’s “Landing Complex 1” at the Cape, the former Launch Complex 13.
Observers along the Space Coast and beyond could see rocket engines firing in darkness as the booster descended from as high as 124 miles up and slowed its fall from hypersonic speed.
A loud “boom” could be heard shortly after touchdown a few miles down the coast from where the booster had lifted off, but camera images showed it upright.
The Falcon had landed.
Thousands of employees at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., erupted in cheers and chants of “USA, USA!”
Cheers also rang out at Kennedy Space Center, where hundreds of people associated with Orbcomm Inc., whose 11 satellites were on top of the rocket’s upper stage and still headed toward space, were gathered to watch.
The cheers continued as all 11 satellites were deployed safely in orbits about 500 miles up, ensuring that the day’s primary mission was a success for the publicly traded provider of machine-to-machine communications, an industry sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things."
