Video: what you'd see if you were actually on the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that landed at sea
This marks the third successful landing on a drone ship since April this year.
US aerospace company SpaceX landed the first stage (a 14-story-tall portion of the rocket body) of its Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. This marked the third successful landing of the Falcon 9 at sea.
The video above is a time-lapse of the onboard view of the rocket making its way from space onto the drone ship.
The landing took place a few minutes before the second stage of the Falcon 9 launched a Thai communications satellite, THAICOM-8, into space.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been trying to build reusable rockets to cut down the cost of access to orbit. After failed attempts for over a year, the company was first successful in landing a rocket back on earth in December 2015. In April and early May 2016, two rockets successfully landed at sea. This recent makes the total of four over all.
Below is a video of the first landing in April.
Despite the successful landings, the reusability of these rockets hasn’t been tested yet.
The Verge reported, “...to truly achieve its goal of reusability, the company is going to have to start re-flying the boosters that it has landed. In April, Musk said that he hoped to launch the first rocket that landed at sea by May or June, but the plan appears to have changed. The company now plans to re-fly the rocket that was landed at the beginning of May, but there is no timeframe for that launch.”