SpaceX now has several successes of soft landing on the first floor of its Falcon 9 launcher, but there have been many attempts to get there. A video summarizes some of the series failures before success.
To reduce the cost of space missions and prepare for the exploration and colonization of natural satellites or planets, SpaceX chose the reusable rocket strategy.
While the current launchers are used only once before falling back into the atmosphere and flowing into the oceans, the firm has sought to smoothly return the first stage of its Falcon 9 launcher to the earth farm, or an automated barge in the Atlantic Ocean.
Long road to reusabity of Falcon 9 primary boost stage…When upper stage & fairing also reusable, costs will drop by a factor >100. pic.twitter.com/WyTAQ3T9EP— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 14 septembre 2017
The first success of this method on barge was obtained in April 2016 but it took before that many attempts unsuccessful. Elon Musk offers a short summary of these attempts often ending in the explosion of the launcher in a small video showing different stages of the tests and different causes of failures.
After collecting several main stages of its Falcon 9 launcher, SpaceX has moved on to the next step, namely the reuse of a launcher already operated successfully.
The company is now looking to recover more elements from its launchers, with the ambition to reduce mission costs by two while allowing for very close launches.
suivre Dhaouadi Aymensur
