Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, will attempt on March 30 to relaunch and recover a first-stage booster of a 229-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket that SpaceX fist fired off in April 2016.
The booster helped deliver a satellite into orbit and then managed to successfully land itself on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. This is highly unusual, as generally most of the rocket parts crash into the ocean, forever sinking at the bottom.
SpaceX's Rocket Launch Potentially Revolutionary
A booster is the most expensive component of a multi-stage rocket, and it can cost up to tens of millions of dollars.
The CEO of SpaceX declared that, in the event of reusing a rocket booster on a Falcon 9 rocket launch, customers who have only launched satellites and space station supplies could get a discount of approximately 30 percent. This percentage is a big deal, since the costs of the launch are about $62 million.
The price difference will be all the more significant, as the rockets of SpaceX are already the most affordable worldwide. A 30 percent discount would save companies more than $18 million every time there is a launch.
"This is potentially revolutionary. Reusability has been the Holy Grail in access to space for a long, long time," noted John Logsdon, a space policy expert and historian at George Washington University's Space Policy Institute.
The entire philosophy of SpaceX promotes the idea of reusability. Musk's company has been planning on using reusable rockets since the company was first created 15 years ago. Back then, there was only Falcon LV, which later turned into Falcon 1 that Musk displayed at the Washington D.C. National Mall in 2003, according to The Planetary Society's Jason Davis.
After every launch, SpaceX attempts to save only the first stage of its vehicles, such as the 14-story-tall main body of Falcon 9, which contains the primary engines and most of the fuel. Approximately 10 minutes after every launch, the first stage separates itself from the top portion of the rocket, making a controlled dive back to our planet.
The fuel that remains is employed in reigniting the engines on the rocket in a succession of burns, to boost the vehicle and make it safely re-enter our planet's atmosphere. This process is better known under the name of supersonic retro propulsion.
Customer SES Is Ready For The Flight
The customer who will fly the first "flight-proven" rocket is SES, a satellite operator from Luxembourg. The cargo is the SES-10 satellite, which is meant to provide communication services to Latin America. Additionally, SES-10 will sit in a super high orbit — 22,000 miles above our planet's surface, a place known under the name of a geostationary orbit. Here, the satellite will follow our planet's rotation, and it will hover over the same patch of the planet continuously.
"Let me be clear, we are prepared to stand in front of this rocket with great confidence. We have had unprecedented access to review the efforts to prepare [the rocket] for a second flight and we are confident in its readiness," noted Martin Halliwell, SES's chief technology officer, in a March 28 press briefing.
