SpaceX landed a rocket on a boat five years ago – it changed everything

I was born just four months after the last Apollo astronauts brushed gray dust out of their spaceships and pulled away from the Moon. As my interest in space grew over the years, and writing about this industry became my profession, I felt a deeper sense of regret for missing out on the glorious moment of triumph in our shared space history. I lived with that regret for decades – until April 8, 2016.

SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket on a boat five years ago today.

I was not prepared for the experience of seeing a skinny, black-and-white rocket fall from the sky, against the blue backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean, and land on a small drone. While white caps crashed on the side of the boat, it looked like it was a portal that would open in the future. This breakthrough in rocket technology has removed the regret I had about missing Apollo. Because in my opinion, the landing of a first phase of the Falcon 9 at sea was an important step in reducing the cost of dropping people and payloads into space, and unlocking a bright spatial future.

After nearly a dozen failed attempts, the ensuing landing quickly filled a SpaceX hangar full of used rockets. This caught some SpaceX engineers off guard. “It even surprised us that we suddenly had ten first phases or something,” Hans Koenigsmann, one of SpaceX’s earliest jobs, said a few years later. “And we were like, well, we did not really account for that.”

Need for sea

A few months before this launch, SpaceX, of course, successfully brought a first phase of Falcon 9 back to its “landing zone” off the coast of Florida, near its launch site. It was a great achievement. But landing on a drone is so much harder. If you land on the shore, just move the rocket. When we hit the sea, both the rocket and the drone move, and there are sea states and more to consider.

However, the economy virtually requires it to land less than a launch pad. This is because a rocket gradually leaned from a vertical to horizontal orientation as it prepared to release its second phase on a trajectory. At this point, tons of propellant need to stop this horizontal velocity and return the course to the launch site. It is much more fuel efficient to have the rocket follow a parabolic arc and land hundreds of miles from the launch site.

This is confirmed in the performance data. A Falcon 9 rocket that lands on a drone can lift about 5.5 tons to a geostationary transfer orbit, compared to 3.5 tons for a rocket that lands back on the launch site. If SpaceX had not figured out how to land the first phase of the Falcon 9 on a drone, it would have eliminated about 40 percent of the rocket’s lifting capacity, a huge fine that would have the benefit of reusing rockets. would negate.

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Nearly a decade ago, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin filed a patent on the concept of landing a rocket on a barge. (This forced SpaceX to go to court, and the challenge against the patent finally passed.) But there is a big difference in knowing and doing something. Since obtaining its patent, Blue Origin has not yet launched a orbital rocket, let alone from the country. Bezos refurbished and named a platform ship, Jacklyn, but it is unlikely to catch on early before 2023.

On the other hand, since his first successful landing on the drone Of course I still love you, SpaceX returned 56 more Falcon 9 rockets at sea. Landings in the sea have a remarkable technological proof. Of SpaceX’s ten rocket launches in 2021, each rode to orbit an earlier runway. Some returned to space within four weeks of a previous launch. By landing its first Falcon 9 rocket at sea, SpaceX started a revolution in launch. Rocket reuse is no longer a novelty – it is considered an essential part of the business.

“I’m really surprised to see new launch vehicles being developed that can not be used again,” Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck told me in December.

A personal journey

The dramatic landing of that first phase also launched me on a personal journey. I realized that SpaceX was not just a very interesting company doing interesting things in space. Rather, it was the transformative space company of my lifetime.

I began to report more deeply on the activities of the company and try to understand where it came from, and to better see the motivations of the founder and chief engineer Elon Musk of SpaceX. This eventually resulted in a book, Liftoff, about the company’s origins. One thing I have taken from this report is that, just as miraculously as the automatic landing of drunken ships, it is just one in a long series of miracles that must be realized to place humans on the surface of Mars.

In the 2000s, SpaceX was many times nearly dead as a new company with its Falcon 1 rocket. In the 2010s, SpaceX visited the Falcon 9, the first contracts for NASA launches and commercial satellites. These missions, in turn, gave SpaceX engineers the breathing room to experiment with repairing and refurbishing used rockets. Today, thanks to this, they can fly the first shift quickly and at significantly lower cost.

Now, with Starship, SpaceX wants to reuse a much larger orbital vehicle and not only bring back the first phase – in this, the Super Heavy booster looks a lot like the first phase of Falcon 9, but also the Starship vehicle. This represents a very different challenge, as Starship will return to Earth at a rotational speed, around Mach 23. And after that, SpaceX engineers will have to figure out how to fill star orbits in low Earth, and then how to keep a crew . alive on the way to Mars, on the surface and on the way back home. Each of these poses a major engineering problem.

However, when I reflect on how far SpaceX has come within five years since the first landing, I have only a single, predominant thought. If this company could land rockets on boats in the middle of the ocean, what would it not do? And that’s why I’m glad I’ve missed the Apollo era now that it means I can live in this moment, with an uncertain but boundless future ahead of us.

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