Posted on 04/18/2014 1:56:24 PM PDT by blam
Watch Elon Musk's Reusable Rocket Launch And Land Itself In This Amazing Video Shot By A Drone
Jillian D'Onfro
April 18, 2014, 2:27 PM
Elon Musk's private space company, SpaceX, has been experimenting with reusable rockets since last year.
Because the cost of fuel is much less compared to the cost of building a rocket from scratch every time, Musk and his team are trying to master reusable rockets so they can get closer to their goal of making commercial space travel more affordable.
The company just posted an amazing video on YouTube of its Falcon 9 Reusable rocket lifting off, rising 250 meters, hovering, and landing on the ground right next to the launch pad.
Even cooler, the video was shot by a drone.
Later today, SpaceX will make its second attempt to send its Dragon spacecraft, carrying 4,000 pounds of supplies, on a Falcon 9 rocket (like the one in the video) to the International Space Station on its third resupply mission.
That launch is scheduled for 3:25 p.m. Eastern and will be broadcast live from the SpaceX website starting at 2:45 p.m.
In the meantime, check out this amazing video:
(click to the site to see a short video)
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
At this point it’s looking successful.
Data upload from tracking plane shows first stage landing in Atlantic was good! Flight computers continued transmitting for 8 seconds after reaching the water. Stopped when booster went horizontal. Several boats enroute through heavy seas...
And he's a genuine African-American.
I recently found out that he kind of started by SpaceX by accident. He wanted to use his Paypal money to do a couple of demo launches, like sending a tiny amount of cargo to Mars. He was going to buy old Soviet ICBM's, but the Russians tried to screw him so he started his own company.
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Wouldn’t the extra fuel necessary to land the rocket reduce its payload? Why not just use parachutes?
The idea is to be able to land it on land and thereby reduce costs and turn-around time to launch again.
Isnt the efficiency of the booster much less because it has to carry so much excess fuel weight to soft land?
Seems a steerable parchute would be better.
The weight penalty is 30% or so, but that’s not as big a deal when you don’t have to trash a $40 million vehicle after every flight. They tried parachutes but the issues of supersonic flight made it impractical. They did the first test of the propulsive landing system in September 2012.
Oh good, was waiting for some news about this
current experiment.
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