The sight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster descending from a great height and landing upright with pinpoint accuracy on a droneship waiting in the ocean never gets old. And the spaceflight company has just done it again.
Minutes after launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission to map the boundaries of the heliosphere (the large bubble created by the solar wind that encapsulates our entire solar system), the first-stage Falcon 9 booster used a combination of re-ignitable engines, aerodynamic control surfaces, thrust vectoring, cold gas thrusters, and navigation systems to land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship waiting off the coast of Florida.
You can watch the descent below:
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/aFkhZPoePS
SpaceX recently captured video of another booster landing (this one on land), tracking it all the way home in this spectacular footage:
Falcon 9’s first stage lands at LZ-2 pic.twitter.com/VJiiJPnXtz
Just a couple of decades ago, if anyone had suggested attempting such a feat, they would’ve been laughed out of town. But in 2015, SpaceX achieved the landing for the first time and has never looked back.
Landing a first-stage Falcon 9 booster in this way allows SpaceX to reuse the booster multiple times, drastically cutting the cost of space missions and thereby opening up orbital access to way more businesses and organizations. One of SpaceX’s boosters has already flown 30 times, with many others having also flown multiple times, highlighting the company’s ability to reuse its first stage with ease.
SpaceX is now applying what it’s learned from landing the Falcon 9 to its next-gen Starship rocket, the most powerful vehicle ever to fly.
The Elon Musk-led company has already managed to land the first stage of the Starship, called the Super Heavy, though instead of it touching down on the ground, the system uses giant mechanical arms on the launch tower to secure the booster just before landing.
SpaceX is aiming to use the Starship for crew and cargo missions to the moon, and hopefully to Mars, too.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.