SpaceX Successfully Lands A Giant Falcon 9 Rocket For The First Time

[kevindavis]

Interstellar News Net:

SpaceX has done it. Elon Musk’s rocket startup just successfully launched and then landed a Falcon 9 rocket some 10 minutes later. This comes after several attempts that ended in fiery explosions.

 

The rocket was carrying 11 satellites destined for low-Earth orbit. It’s important to note, this rocket isn’t a one-off affair, or a small test rocket like the Blue Origin New Shepard or SpaceX Grasshopper.

 

The Falcon 9 is a serious rocket, capable of reaching 124 miles up thanks to the 1.5 million pounds of thrust produced by its 9 engines. It’s designed to take serious payloads into serious orbit. The Blue Origin is capable of taking a few humans 62 miles into the sky — which is still great.

 

SpaceX previously attempted to land a Falcon 9 on a robotic barge. This time around, the company opted for terra firma and a massive concrete landing pad.

[clearvision]

Quite cool.

[Valin]

 

If I may quote out esteemed Vice President "This Is A Big F*****g Deal!"

[Valin]

The whole thing

Dec 21, 2015

The very first full thrust Falcon 9 rocket launched today by SpaceX from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 00:29 UTC, December 22nd 2015, carrying 11 Orbcomm Generation 2 satellites into orbit.

This was the return to flight mission for SpaceX since the first stage failure in June of this year which left an unmanned Dragon capsule in the Atlantic ocean, it was also the very first attempt at landing the first stage on land. The stage successfully reignited and then softly touched down at the newly renovated Launch Complex 13, now called Landing Zone 1 of Cape Canaveral around 10 minutes into flight.

[Valin]

Remember 6 months ago?

[Valin]

Elon Musk: A Revolution in Space Flight
Charles Krauthammer
December 31, 2015

Fractured and divided as we are, on one thing we can agree: Twenty-fifteen was a miserable year. The only cheer was provided by Lincoln Chafee and the Pluto flyby (two separate phenomena), as well as one seminal aeronautical breakthrough. On December 21, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, after launching eleven satellites into orbit, returned its 15-story booster rocket, upright and intact, to a landing pad at Cape Canaveral. That’s a $60 million mountain of machinery — recovered. (The traditional booster rocket either burns up or disappears into some ocean.)

 

The reusable rocket has arrived. Arguably, it arrived a month earlier when Blue Origin, a privately owned outfit created by Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO and owner of the Washington Post) launched and landed its own booster rocket, albeit for a suborbital flight. But whether you attribute priority to Musk or Bezos, the two events together mark the inauguration of a new era in space flight. Musk predicts that the reusable rocket will reduce the cost of accessing space a hundredfold. This depends, of course, on whether the wear and tear and stresses of the launch make the refurbishing prohibitively expensive. Assuming it’s not, and assuming Musk is even 10 percent right, reusability revolutionizes the economics of space flight.

 

Which both democratizes and commercializes it. Which means space travel has now slipped the surly bonds of government — presidents, Congress, NASA bureaucracies. Its future will now be driven far more by a competitive marketplace with its multiplicity of independent actors, including deeply motivated, financially savvy, and visionary entrepreneurs. To be sure, the enterprise is not entirely free of government. After all, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket landed on a Cape Canaveral pad formerly used to launch Air Force Atlas rockets. Moreover, initial financing for these ventures already depends in part on NASA contracts, such as resupplying the space station.

 

(Snip)

 

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Bladderball2 • 2 days ago

I for one do not want to live in a world above which there is no space station. The satisfaction of knowing there are people up there right now has incalculable value to me, but that's because I'm a space junkie.

 

 

Frank Lovejoy Bladderball2 • 2 days ago

But what's the point?

There's nothing out there to see that we cannot see more easily, cheaply, and safely with long-range telescopes. There's no resources to mine that are not more readily available (and cost effective) to mine on Earth. There are no civilizations to visit, no Space Fleets to join.

I like space and space travel. But it's a pointless investment.

 

[kevindavis]

I like the following thing:

 

Let private space companies launch satellites into orbit, build and maintain space stations, and build colonies on the moon and mars. Let NASA just explore. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

[Valin]

I like the following thing:

 

Let private space companies launch satellites into orbit, build and maintain space stations, and build colonies on the moon and mars. Let NASA just explore. To boldly go where no man has gone before.

 

 

Yup! The question is does NASA have the ability today to do that? They've become just another bureaucracy.