extremetech.com By Ryan Whitwam on March 24, 2017
It took a lot of clever engineering behind the scenes and some very public failures, but SpaceX has finally worked out the kinks of landing its Falcon 9 rockets after launch. It’s been recovering rockets so frequently that we don’t even cover all the landings anymore, but until now all those rockets have been sitting in a hangar someplace. SpaceX is finally set to reuse one of its reusable rockets.
SpaceX has recovered eight rockets in total — three of them on land and five at sea. The first rocket ever landed by SpaceX will never fly again. It’s on display at the company’s California headquarters. The rocket prepped for flight is the second one recovered (the first came down on land, which is far easier).
A rocket set to launch next week from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida was flown by SpaceX last year (that’s it above). This is actually a rather famous rocket for SpaceX. It was used in April 2016 to complete its first resupply mission of the International Space Station (including delivery of the Bigelow expandable habitat). Not only that, it was the very first rocket that was successfully landed on the drone ship. There were a few spectacular crashes in previous ocean landing attempts.
Reusing the first stage of a launch vehicle has the potential to save a huge amount of money. Right now, most rockets simply drop the first stage in the ocean as the payload makes its way into space. That means you have to build a new one for every single launch. By recovering the first stage, SpaceX thinks it can shave 30% off the cost of its launches. Of course, it hasn’t saved anything yet. So far it’s just collecting a bunch of used rockets. Successfully refurbishing this one and sending it on a second mission will be the true test.
More:
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/246505-spacex-set-actually-reuse-one-reusable-rockets
