Scott Powers
In an effort that could greatly reduce the cost and turnaround time of launching rockets, SpaceX successfully launched a used rocket Thursday evening from Kennedy Space Center.
The Falcon 9 rocket – with a previously launched, recovered, and refurbished first stage – blasted off from Launch Complex 39A at 6:27 p.m., and successfully lifted the SES-10 communications satellite into orbit
Eight minutes later, SpaceX brought the rocket stage back to Earth again, landing it on the company’s landing barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
Moments after the landing, an obviously-elated SpaceX founder Elon Musk hailed at as a big day for the space industry, “proving that something that can be done that many people said was impossible.”
“We just had an incredible day today. The first preflight of an orbital class booster, did its mission perfectly, dropped off the second stage, came back and landed on the drone ship, right on the bullseye,” Musk said in an interview live-streamed over the SpaceX website. “It’s an amazing day I think for space as a whole, for the space industry.
“It means you can fly and re-fly and orbit class booster, which is the most expensive part of the rocket,” Musk continued. “This is going to be obviously a huge revolution in space flight. It’s the difference between where, if you had airplanes, you threw away the airplane after every flight, versus you can reuse them multiple times.”
“It’s been 15 years to get to this point. It’s taken a long time. An awful lot of difficult steps along the way,” he added.
It’s particularly a big day for SpaceX, already the world’s most affordable and fastest-turnaround rocket company for orbital launches, now on its way to cutting those costs even more. SpaceX officials said a typical launch costs $62 million, but that only about 4 percent of that figure, about $300,000, is for the fuel. That means most of the rest of the cost is in the actual vehicle, which, if reused multiple times, can bring the launch costs down.
There have been no reports if the Luxembourg-based SES Corp. got a big discount on this launch, testing the reused rocket. SES officials preferred the words “flight-proven” to used.
