Right on track to make history this week, SpaceX has test-fired its Falcon 9 rocket whose first stage blasted the Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station (ISS) in April 2016.
The two-stage booster will lift the SES-10 communications satellite on March 30, Thursday, in the first orbital mission to employ a used rocket and demonstrate founder Elon Musk’s promise of reusable rocket technology and lower launch costs. The historic event is poised to happen from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Setting The Stage For Thursday Launch
“Static fire test complete,” company representatives wrote on Twitter, also marking Thursday as the launch day of SES-10.
SpaceX briefly fired the nine Merlin 1D engines of the previously flown Falcon 9 in the pre-flight test at 2 p.m. EDT, which shut down around three seconds later. A thick white cloud conquered the afternoon skies of pad 39A, rapidly dissipating afterward.
The move, also known as a “hot-fire” test, is a routine pre-flight practice for the company to assist engineers in gauging the rocket’s readiness for launch. Once the test yields good results, SpaceX should be good to go with its Thursday launch at 6 p.m., the start of a 2.5-hour window.
According to forecasters, one can expect 70 percent chance of acceptable weather on launch day.
Airbus Defense and Space’s SES-10 satellite is poised to provide direct-to-home (DTH) television and high-speed data services in Latin America and the Caribbean. Luxembourg-based SES was SpaceX’s earliest commercial customer and the first to sign up as a “passenger” on its booster.
“We believe reusable rockets will open up a new era of spaceflight, and make access to space more efficient in terms of cost and manifest management,” said SES CTO Martin Halliwell in a statement, looking back at their first launch with the rocket builder in 2013.
The Buzz Around Reusable Rockets
The Thursday launch will mark the private spaceflight firm’s fourth launch so far this year, following the blasting of 10 Iridium NEXT satellites to space in January, an ISS resupply mission in February, and an EchoStar satellite’s launch last March 16.
SpaceX has always touted its development of reusable rockets, and since its founding in 2002 has landed the first stages of Falcon 9 in eight orbital missions. Thursday will be historic in that it will be the first time that the company will ever re-fly one of the landed boosters.
"In order for us to really open up access to space, we've got to achieve full and rapid reusability,” Musk said back in April. “And being able to do that for the primary rocket booster is going to be a huge impact on cost.”
Each Falcon 9 rocket is priced at $54 million, and fuel for every mission costs roughly about $200,000. The latest count puts SpaceX’s recovered rockets at eight: five by sea and three by land.
Some Falcon 9 first stages landed near launch sites, but rockets carrying payloads to distant orbits typically do not contain enough fuel to go all the way back to terra firma, hence landing on autonomous drone ships at sea.
The first-ever recovered rocket — proudly displayed at SpaceX’s California headquarters — was also the first to fare well in a drone ship landing. It was the second to successfully land in general, the first returning at Cape Canaveral in December 2015.
SpaceX seeks to not just pilot reusable rockets in the spaceflight industry, but also introduce Universal Internet to establish high-speed internet with Mars from Earth.
