As a spaceship This week, the vehicle collected all the attention, the Falcon 9 Falcon 9 rocket still reached impressive milestones.
Both took place during the relatively anonymous premieres of the Starlink Starlink satellites, but they are still noteworthy because they emphasize the value of the reuse of the first stage, which SpaceX was a pioneer over the past decade.
The first milestone took place on Wednesday morning with the introduction of the Starlink 10-56 mission with Cape Canaveral in Florida. The first stage that launched these satellites, Booster 1096, was the second premiere and successfully landed on Just read the instructions Ship drone. It is striking that SpaceX 400. Time made a drone ship landing.
Then, less than 24 hours later, another Falcon 9 rocket released the Starlink 10-11 mission from a nearby start pad at Kennedy Space Center. This first stage, booster 1067, then returned and landed on another drone ship, Gravity deficiency.
It is a special amplifier that debuted in June 2021 and starting a wide range of mission, including two Dragon Crew vehicles to an international space station and some Galileo satellites for the European Union. On Thursday, the rocket made the 30th flight, for the first time Falcon 9 Booster achieved this level of experience.
Decade in creation
These milestones took place about a decade after SpaceX, they were successful with the first stage.
For the first time, the company carried out the controlled entrance to the first stage of Rocket Falcon 9 in September 2013, during the first flight version 1.1 of the vehicle. This proved the life of the concept of supersonic reinrop from which until then was only theoretical.
This includes inflammation of nine rocket engines, while the vehicle travels faster than the speed of sound in the upper atmosphere, with external temperatures exceeding 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. Due to the blunt strength of this re -entry, the engines in the outer ring of the rocket wanted to develop, the head of the company at that time, Tom Mueller, told me about the book Re -entrance. The success of the first attempt seemed unbelievable.
He remembered how he watched this launch from the Vandenberg Space Force base in California and observing Reenrees as a camera on board the founder of Spacex, Elon Musk, a jet, followed the rocket. The first stage went downstairs, intact.
“I remember watching live video and saw the engine light in the ocean,” said Mueller. “And the saint, it was there. The rocket fell, landed in the ocean and blew up. It was unreal. It worked for the first time. I was like a barge. Prepare your legs for landing. This shit works.”
You need much more DIY and experiments, but until December 2015, SpaceX landed its first rocket on a pad along the Florida coast. The first landing of drone ships took place in April 2016. Slightly less than a year after this SpaceX they achieved the Falcon 9 scene for the first time.
Silencing doubts
Many people in the industry were skeptical about the SpaceX approach to reuse. In the mid -2010, both European and Japanese space agencies wanted to develop another generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with Ariane 6 and Japan with H3 Space Agencies decided on time-honored, worn rockets instead of pressing reuse.
As a result, both competitors of commercial satellite premieres are now about a decade for SpaceX in terms of starting technology. If the ambitious spacecraft rocket is successful, this gap may be more widened.