Ladies and gentlemen… they did it again. If you closely follow SpaceX's advances, you quickly come to the conclusion that "it was a matter of time" for something like this to happen, but that doesn't change the fact that we are facing a new chapter in the history of the space age. After carrying out a resupply mission bound for the International Space Station, SpaceX successfully landed its Falcon 9 rocket on an ocean drone ship.
The road to reusability
There are many aspects that need to be optimized in a space launch if you want to place material in orbit at a lower cost, and one of the most critical is the capacity for reuse. The concept is not exactly new, as the space shuttles accumulated more than 130 missions (including those of the Enterprise prototype), but now all attention is on rockets. SpaceX's work has been particularly impressive even with its accumulated failures, and Elon Musk's company can now say that it has checked off two of its biggest goals: landing a rocket on land, and another on the sea. The first case happened in December of last year, after placing eleven satellites into orbit for the Orbcomm 2 mission. And the second was just a few hours ago. Let's see:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/wKDr7YwRR7YA perfect landing
No, this is no visual trick: the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that successfully completed the CRS-8 mission landed without a hitch on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You". Officially, this is SpaceX's fifth attempt at a landing (or the sixth, depending on how you interpret their tests), and the entire process took just under nine minutes. The rocket managed to set the Dragon capsule on its way, loaded with materials and supplies for the International Space Station, and whose manifest includes the expandable Bigelow unit that will serve as an experimental module for the next two years.
To better visualize what SpaceX has achieved this time, consider the following: As I mentioned above, the rocket that landed on the drone is a Falcon 9, version 1.1 Full Thrust. The rocket with its capsule is 70 meters high, that is, a building of about 25 stories. The drone's deck is 91.5 by 52 meters, quite large from a human perspective, but very small for a landing situation, and without forgetting the detail that it is floating on water, while its engines try to compensate for the movement in an attempt to achieve the greatest possible stability. This second success of SpaceX is even bigger than the first, but the company knows that there will be failures in the future, and beyond the euphoria, they do not forget that it is a long-term effort.
