3 Commando Brigade

SpaceX just landed an orbital rocket for the first time!

So for those of you who aren't rocket nerds, this is a *HUGE* deal. This was the first launch of the Falcon 9 since they had a launch failure earlier this year, but rather than just fixing the issue with the rocket that caused the failure they went ahead and pimped it out to be more powerful etc. And then they turned 3/4 of it around and flew it back to the friggen launch site

Video linked below, skip to 32:03 for the launch itself, and 41:34 for the landing!


I think I probably just woke up everyone on my street, hollering and stamping and jumping around xD

That is crazy. I didn't even know they were going for this that is huge.


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It's going from 7km/s sideways, to slowly backwards, out of the atmosphere, back into the atmosphere, then landing ass-first at the centre of the friggen bulls-eye. They just lost it on the stream

The Falcon 9 is already one of the cheapest $/kg launchers on the market, and there are credible estimates that even a single reuse could effectively cut a third off the average launch cost. The really important bit out of this, though, is that this is the same technology that Dragon 2 will need to return from the ISS, and the successor will need to descend to Mars. Dream big

For those of you who don't know, SpaceX is run by Elon Musk. This guy is possibly one of the most iconic entrepreneurs and visionaries of our generation.




This is Elon Musk.



He is the CEO of SpaceX - the first privately funded company to send a spacecraft to the ISS (and more).



He is the CEO of Tesla Motors - a new(ish) car company that has taken the car industry by storm. Tesla's cars only run on solar energy.

The Tesla Model S (shown above) was so good that it actually broke the car rating system:
"The Tesla initially scored 103 in the Consumer Reports' Ratings system, which by definition doesn’t go past 100."




He helped start Solar City - America's largest solar power provider.




He was the CEO of PayPal, which sold for US$1.5 billion in 2002.




A real-life Iron Man, he was the inspiration for Tony Stark's eccentric personality in the Iron Man movies (and even played a cameo in Iron Man 2).




He unveiled plans to launch a high-speed Hyperloop transportation system. It's predicted to have speeds of about 760 mph.




 
Finally, and this is my favourite, he wants to colonise mars.

Does it even count as hero worship when they're just so eminently deserving of the praise?

So just a follow up to this, the rocket that they landed they did a test fire during the week and it worked, a few fluctuations in one of the engines which they are investigating.  They are also today at around 6pm GMT going to make another launch for NASA and a European environments agency to send a satellite to observe sea levels.  They are going to try and recover that falcon 9 rocket to their sea based recover device.  The last 2 times they have tried this it ended in catastrophic failure, so lets see if they can do it.

The last two times they were harpooned by a sticky throttle actuator (fixed) and insufficient hydraulic fluid (increased) *ftfy*

But yeah, it should be interesting to watch tonight! The telemetry and footage is likely to be less comprehensive for the landing stage due to it being over the horizon this time, but still we'll hopefully see a continuation of success

Well they almost did it. Just one of the legs didn't lock so it kind of fell over...


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Elon said they think it was ice buildup from the super-foggy launch that caused the leg latch to fail to lock. Still, it's good that it's another case where it's a small simple fix rather than some failure with the overall concept - next time add some heating elements!