SpaceX sticks daytime rocket landing back on Earth after launch to space
There may come a time when SpaceX landing a rocket stage back on Earth after flying to space isn't news -- when we can simply take these science-fiction looking landings for granted and brush them off as no big deal.
But today is not that day.
The Elon Musk-founded spaceflight company stuck yet another beautiful landing of the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket after launching an uncrewed Dragon spacecraft toward the International Space Station from a historic launch pad. The Dragon spacecraft was loaded down with thousands of supplies for NASA.
The booster set down gently on a pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida about 8 minutes after its 9:39 a.m. ET launch on Sunday.
This landing marks the company's eighth total landing and third back on solid ground. (The other five landed on drone ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.)
The launch itself was actually history-making as well. The Falcon 9 took off to space from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center, marking the first time the pad has been in use since the end of the space shuttle program.
Pad 39A was used to launch multiple missions that brought astronauts to the moon during the Apollo days and was revamped to fit the space shuttle program in the 1970s. The pad's last shuttle mission flew in 2011 and hasn't been used again until Sunday.
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The Dragon will now spend about two days in transit on the way to the Space Station, where astronauts onboard will unload the food, science experiments and hardware carried within the Dragon's belly.
While SpaceX's landings look like something out of science fiction, they actually have a practical purpose for SpaceX. The private company is hoping to create a fleet of reusable rockets that can fly multiple missions to space instead of the one-and-done method in play among traditional launch providers today.
By bringing the boosters back after launches, SpaceX can refurbish them and fly those stages again, greatly reducing the cost of launching to space. Although SpaceX hasn’t yet re-launched a previously flown booster, that could change soon.
The private company is planning to fly its first previously flown rocket stage in March, after it reaches Cape Canaveral from Texas, where it was going through testing.
SpaceX has had a rough couple years
A Falcon 9 rocket exploded not long after launching another Dragon spacecraft for NASA in June 2015, and another accident in September 2016 grounded the company's launches for months during an accident investigation.
SpaceX appears to be back on its feet, launching and landing again, but the company should pick up its launch cadence in the months to come. It has an aggressive launch schedule for the next year.
Who knows, maybe in a year or even less -- assuming SpaceX continues too succeed -- these kinds of landings won't be news anymore. But even so, that won't make them any less cool.
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
