![]() ![]() The dramatic landing of that first stage also launched me on something of a personal journey. "I’m really surprised when I see new launch vehicles in development now that aren’t reusable," Peter Beck, the founder of Rocket Lab, told me in December. No longer is reusing rockets a novelty-it's considered an essential part of the business. Some returned to space within four weeks of a previous launch. By landing its first Falcon 9 rocket at sea, SpaceX began a revolution in launch. Of SpaceX's 10 orbital rocket launches in 2021, every one of them rode to orbit on a previously flown first stage. Ocean-based landings have proven a remarkably enabling technology. Bezos has retrofitted and named a platform ship, Jacklyn, but it is unlikely to catch a rocket before 2023 at the earliest.īy contrast, since its first successful landing on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, SpaceX has safely returned 56 more Falcon 9 rockets at sea. Since acquiring its patent, Blue Origin has yet to launch an orbital rocket, let alone land one. (This forced SpaceX to go to court, and its challenge against the patent eventually succeeded.) But there is a big difference in knowing something and actually doing something. Nearly a decade ago, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin patented the concept of landing a rocket on a barge for this very reason. When touching down at sea, both the rocket and the drone ship are moving, and there are sea states and more to consider. When landing on the coast, only the rocket is moving. But landing on a drone ship is that much more difficult. "And we were like, well, we didn't really account for that." Need for seaĪ few months prior to this boat landing, of course, SpaceX had successfully returned a Falcon 9 first stage to its "landing zone" along the Florida coast, near its launch pad. "It even surprised us that we suddenly had ten first stages or something like that," Hans Koenigsmann, one of SpaceX's earliest hires, said a few years afterward. This caught some SpaceX engineers off guard. In my mind, landing a Falcon 9 first stage at sea represented an essential step toward reducing the cost of getting people and payloads into space and unlocked a bright spacefaring future.Īfter nearly a dozen failed attempts, subsequent landings soon filled a SpaceX hangar full of used rockets. This breakthrough in rocket technology washed away any regrets I had about missing Apollo. As whitecaps crashed into the side of the boat, it seemed like a portal opening into the future. I was not prepared for the experience of watching a skinny, black-and-white rocket fall out of the sky against the azure backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean and land on a small drone ship. I lived with that regret for decades-right up until April 8, 2016.įive years ago today, SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket first stage on a boat. As my interest in space grew over the years and writing about this industry became my profession, I felt a deepening sense of regret for missing that glorious moment of triumph in our shared space history. The landing mistakes comes after exactly a year when in 2020 there was the crash of another Falcon 9.I was born a mere four months after the final Apollo astronauts brushed gray dust from their spacesuits and lifted off from the Moon. It is still behind the record of the most launches made by any rocket, but it definitely had a long enough life. The Falcon 9 was used successfully for six lanches and had 5 successful landings. But from the live stream, it can be made out that the rocket must have crashed in the ocean. There has been no official news from the company saying that the Falcon 9 has crashed. The entire thing was caught in the live stream where no rocket ever lands in the drone ship. It also seems to be a time when the company has been struggling a lot with landing as with its starships. This is the first time in a whole year that the company has missed the landing of the rocket. But the SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket used in the most recent Starlink mission did not land back on the pad in the ocean. And after the launch, the rocket lands perfectly back on a drone ship in the Atlantic ocean. SpaceX launches its Starlink satellites by using a Falcon 9 rocket. ![]()
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