SpaceX added its most meaningful chapter to space-exploration history thus far Thursday, successfully launching a satellite at dusk on a preflown rocket booster that was recovered along with the nose cone, or fairing, shortly after the Florida launch.
The feat will drive down the costs of spaceflight, allowing for more access and new discoveries once the company can turn around its “used” equipment more quickly.
“This is a huge day. My mind is blown, frankly,” CEO Elon Musk said in a press conference after the launch. “I was really quite speechless after it all happened. It’s definitely one of the biggest things ever.”
Thursday’s launch, at 3:27 PDT, took off from the site of the Apollo missions at Cape Canaveral’s Kennedy Space Center with a two-part goal. In addition to delivering an SES communications satellite into orbit, SpaceX returned the rocket’s first-stage booster to land vertically on an autonomous drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
Not only did it accomplish both missions, but the rocket’s fairing also was returned to Earth, dropped intact into the Atlantic Ocean for recovery.
This particular first stage landed on an ocean platform almost exactly a year ago after a space station launch for NASA. SpaceX extensively refurbished and tested the 15-foot booster, still sporting its nine original engines.
SpaceX employees jammed outside Mission Control at the company’s Hawthorne headquarters, cheering loudly every step of the way — and again when the satellite reached its proper orbit.
Across the street from the company’s Rocket Road headquarters, dozens of workers who helped build the rocket gathered at LA Ale Works brewery to watch.
Hawthorne resident Eruch Henry, an avionics harness technician at SpaceX, said it was a proud moment for him and his family. His mom joined him.
“My grandfather worked in the building (SpaceX now owns) when it was Northrop as a secret machinist,” Henry said. “I drive the same path he did to work every day and live in the same house.”
As far as prelaunch jitters, he said he was sure everything would go smoothly: “There’s a little bit of nervousness but not as much as other people,” he said.
His mother, Juanita Henry, said the whole family celebrates SpaceX’s successes.
“We all get together to celebrate and watch launches and landings,” she said.
Mars is the goal
Blue Origin, an aerospace company started by another tech billionaire, Jeff Bezos, already has reflown a rocket. One of his New Shepard rockets, in fact, has soared five times from Texas. Those flights, however, were suborbital.
NASA also has shared the quest for rocket reusability. During the space shuttle program, the twin booster rockets dropped away two minutes into flight and parachuted into the Atlantic for recovery. The booster segments were mixed and matched for each flight.
There were a few hiccups in Thursday’s otherwise successful SpaceX mission: A grid fin caught fire as the booster returned to Earth, and some paint bubbled from the heat of Earth’s atmosphere.
But Musk brushed off the anomalies, saying there are already engineering fixes in place for those issues.
“There’s a million little things,” he said. “Overall, we have a plan for 24-hour reusability.”
The relaunch success comes 15 years after Musk began investing billions of dollars earned from founding PayPal into the rocket maker startup with a mission of revolutionizing space access by developing a fleet of reusable rockets and spacecraft.
Now, Musk said he hopes to be able to reuse first-stage rockets within a day of launch by next year.
“We need to get really efficient with reusable boosters and fairings,” he said. “We expect the boosters to — with no refurbishment — be capable of 10 flights.”
Soon after, he hopes to launch 100 reused rockets at a time without retooling them.
To make Mars missions routine, he said that the company will need to be able to immediately refly rockets by the thousands.
“Our goal is to get people on Mars before we’re dead and the company is dead,” he said with a giggle. “So we have to just figure out not just the technical issues but the economic issues.
“The significance of today is proving that it’s possible to do that and, at this point, I’m highly confident it’s possible to achieve a 100-fold reduction in the cost of space transport. So, for the same budget, we could do 100 times more things. It’s mind-boggling, next-level.”
Delivering better TV
This mission, dubbed SES-10, delivered a communications satellite into orbit that will upgrade and increase television access across Latin America.
SES Chief Technology Officer Martin Halliwell said the achievement should leave the rocket industry “shaking in its boots,” and said the company likely will now increase its orders for reused-rocket launches for future satellite deliveries.
“A lot of people came back and said, ‘You’re taking an inordinate risk here,’ for being the first preflown rocket customer,” Halliwell said. “I said, ‘I actually don’t think we are.’ We worked very closely with SpaceX. We’ve had a certain transparency, relationship and access to engineering specifics that allow us to have that confidence that the engineering is good. And getting away from the idea that it’s ‘second-hand.’ ”
Halliwell said that he believes it will become irrelevant within two years whether launches rely on new or reused equipment.
SES got an undisclosed discount from SpaceX’s launch fee of roughly $60 million, which is already a fraction of the cost charged by legacy aerospace companies.
“The goal is to make this normal,” Musk added. He didn’t say how much of a discount preflown rocket customers would get, but said it would be “a meaningful discount.”
Engineers cheer, reflect
As they watched the launch Thursday afternoon, SpaceX engineers cheered, slapped each other’s backs, and even gawked open-mouthed a few times as the rocket shot through the atmosphere.
Despite expressing complete confidence in their equipment, the emotion was palpable. One engineer, who wouldn’t give his name, said he only had one thing to say: “F— yeah!”
“Our rocket stages are tested so much in Texas that we’re not as nervous,” said a Dragon spacecraft engineer who asked that her name not be used. “It’s more of a nervous-excited feeling. These boosters get refired over and over and over” before being reused.
Another engineer, who also didn’t want his name printed, said the amount of work that went into crafting the equipment and a smooth launch was intense — “a lot of pressure, a lot of hours.”
But it was worth it, he said.
“This is the first time preflown hardware has ever flown,” he said. “I’m thinking about how exciting this is for the country and company. You talk about one giant step!”
Allison Smith jumped up and down and covered her mouth in awe as the rocket soared. She has friends who work at SpaceX.
“I cried,” she said. “It gave me chills. I’m so stoked about going to Mars. Elon said it took us 15 years to get here — that’s actually not that bad. And it’s going to get better. I’m so proud of my friends who have given so much time to make this happen.”
— Marcia Dunn of The Associated Press contributed to this report.
