Having all but mastered landing their reusable Falcon 9 boosters, SpaceX on Thursday test-fired one of those rockets at full thrust for 150 seconds (the same amount of time they have to function during an actual trip to space) to demonstrate that they can indeed work a second time.
According to Ars Technica and The Verge, the test-fire took place at the aerospace firm’s testing site in MacGregor, Texas, and involved a Falcon 9 rocket that in May had been used to delivered a Japanese communication satellite into orbit. Said booster was upright and secured for the entire duration of the test, which was designed to simulate the length of a first-stage burn.
SpaceX has posted video of the test-fire to YouTube, and while CNET correctly pointed out that there is “nothing super dramatic” about the whole thing. Officials are touting Thursday’s event as the first full-duration, stand-up test of a recycled rocket – and as such, an important step forward in their work.
To date, the California-based aerospace firm has successfully landed five Falcon 9 boosters, the first on which came following a commercial satellite launch last December. Three additional landings, all involving autonomous sea-based landing platform, occurred in April and May of this year, while the fifth landed on the ground earlier this month.
Successful test paves the way for first re-fly attempt this fall
As those who have been following the story already known, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is hoping to recycle booster rockets as a way to reduce the costs associated with spaceflight, as being able to use them more than once could reportedly reduce the price tag by several million dollars.
Despite the five successful landings, the company has yet to attempt to re-fly any of the Falcon 9s that they have recovered thus far, although they have set tentative plans to do so later on this year (possibly in September or October, according to The Verge). Earlier this month, Musk told reporters that the first attempt would utilize the second recovered rocket (the one from the April test flight), as he intended to preserve the December one as a monument of sorts.
“Getting to the point where they are not only recovering them intact, but reusing them and, here is the key point, reusing them on launches where there is a customer paying for that launch, that is the hard part,” Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell told the Christian Science Monitor recently.
“It is the reuse that still remains to be proven. The landing of the stages they seem to have got down now, not 100 percent but they have basically got that sorted. So doing that for three stages at once is an operational challenge, but it is not a fundamental challenge,” McDowell added. “I see no reason why they can’t do this, and it is going to be spectacular.”
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Image credit: SpaceX/YouTube
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