SpaceX's Thursday rocket launch and landing could make history
UPDATE: June 1, 2017, 5:59 p.m. EDT The Falcon 9 launch was called off due to weather concerns on Thursday. SpaceX will attempt to launch again on Saturday.
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SpaceX is poised to enter a very exclusive club.
The Elon Musk-founded spaceflight company is planning to re-fly a refurbished, uncrewed Dragon spacecraft on its second trip to the International Space Station on Thursday.
If successful, this will mark the first time SpaceX has re-flown one of its spacecraft, and it will propel it into the ranks of only a handful of launch providers that have sent the same spacecraft to orbit multiple times.
"NASA’s space shuttle orbiters, the U.S. Air Force’s X-37B, and the Soviet Union’s VA spacecraft were all reused on orbital missions," Robert Pearlman, space historian and founder of collectspace.com, said.
"The first orbital-class spacecraft to be reused, however, was a NASA Gemini capsule that was launched on two suborbital flights (the second flight in 1966 was a test for the U.S. Air Force’s planned Manned Orbiting Laboratory program)."
The Dragon, expected to launch atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:55 p.m. ET Thursday, first flew to the Space Station in 2014.
Since then, SpaceX has refurbished the capsule, getting it ready for its second trip to orbit while loaded down with more supplies for astronauts living and working on the station. If all goes according to plan, the Dragon should make it to the Space Station on June 4.
You can watch the launch and landing via SpaceX in the window below:
SpaceX will also attempt another reusability feat during the Thursday launch. The company is planning to land its Falcon 9 booster back on Earth at Cape Canaveral about 10 minutes after its initial launch.
These tests of reusability are designed to help reduce the cost of launch objects and eventually people to space.
Instead of just discarding expensive spacecraft and rockets, companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin are planning to reuse spacecraft and rocket stages for multiple missions.
SpaceX has already reused a previously flown booster, so this Dragon launch is the next step on its way to producing its fleet of reusable rockets and capsules a reality.
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.
