SpaceX increased the degree of difficulty for tonight’s Falcon 9 rocket landing attempt at sea after launching a Japanese satellite into a super-high orbit – but the feat came off successfully nevertheless.
The California-based company’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, downplayed the odds of success before the launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 10:21 p.m. PT (1:21 a.m. ET Friday). “Rocket re-entry is a lot faster and hotter than last time, so odds of making it are maybe even, but we should learn a lot either way,” he tweeted.
Moments after the Falcon 9’s first stage landed on a drone ship, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, Musk tweeted just one word:
Woohoo!! https://t.co/0P8n8VmFbr
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2016
The mission followed up on last month’s first successful at-sea landing, after the launch of a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station. SpaceX also brought a booster in for a touchdown on a landing pad near the Florida launch site in December, but the company wants to perfect the at-sea procedure because the on-land option won’t be available for at least half of the Falcon 9’s launches.
Tonight’s launch was one of those occasions: Because the JCSAT-14 telecommunications satellite had to go into geosynchronous transfer orbit, more than 22,000 miles up, there was very little propellant to spare.
After the rocket’s second stage separated, the first stage had relight its engines, slow itself down from a supersonic descent and maneuver itself for a controlled landing on the deck of the drone ship. The deck is only about as big as a football field, which looks mighty small from more than 60 miles up.
Even though it was late, a crowd of SpaceX employees showed up at the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., to watch tonight’s launch and its aftermath. When a webcam showed the first stage upright on the drone ship, dubbed “Of Course I Still Love You,” the crowd chanted “USA! USA! USA!” – just as they did a month earlier.
Cheers erupted again when word came that the satellite was in its proper orbit.
The launching part of tonight’s flight seemed almost boringly routine – but it was far more essential to mission success than the booster landing. JCSAT-14 is built to provide Ultra HD 4K TV services to subscribers for Japan-based SKY Perfect JSAT, the leading satellite communication operator in the Asia-Pacific region.
The satellite, which weighs 5 tons including fuel, will also provide data services for airliners and mobile devices, and serve as a communications backup for emergency response and disaster relief.
SpaceX wants to make rocket recovery routine to drive down the cost of access to orbit, with the eventual goal of making spaceflight so cheap that thousands of colonists can fly to Mars. The company’s processing hangar near Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center already houses two recovered Falcon boosters. Now a third is on its way back for testing, and possibly for reflight.
“May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar,” Musk tweeted.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7UbIoyQo50
