• First rocket to return to "launch site" perhaps later this year
    4 replies, posted
SpaceX finally released video of the landing during the Orbcomm mission, about a week ago. [media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQnR5fhCXkQ[/media] [url]http://www.spacex.com/news/2014/07/22/spacex-soft-lands-falcon-9-rocket-first-stage[/url] Highlight: [quote]We will attempt our next water landing on flight 13 of Falcon 9, but with a low probability of success. Flights 14 and 15 will attempt to land on a solid surface with an improved probability of success.[/quote] Flight 13 should be the next ISS mission and flights 14 and 15 should be coming up later this fall!
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/4T0uGoa.png[/IMG]
This is awesome. SpaceX is trying and achieving things that NASA deemed impractical, because SpaceX doesn't have a government to justify itself to. I feel like a second generation of launch vehicles is being born here, between the slowly growing spaceplane industry and the rapidly developing fully reusable launchers.
Awesome, I was waiting for the landing video to pop up. Great to see the video wasn't corrupted like the last landing's was. Shame about the stage exploding after it tipped over, though, but it's not like the things are designed to fall into the water.
[QUOTE=Jon27;45469393]This is awesome. SpaceX is trying and achieving things that NASA deemed impractical, because SpaceX doesn't have a government to justify itself to. I feel like a second generation of launch vehicles is being born here, between the slowly growing spaceplane industry and the rapidly developing fully reusable launchers.[/QUOTE] SpaceX survived through their early days with NASA funding through the COTS program, sending ISS resupply missions to the ISS. Though now they have 4 launch sites (two under construction) and a launch manifest spanning years into the future on both Falcon 9 v1.1 and Falcon Heavy, as well as plans to build a superheavy launch vehicle that would rival the Saturn V in size to achieve Elon Musk's ultimate goal of going to Mars.
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