Tag: Falcon 9

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Obama hails rocket landing in tweetfest

Image: President Obama and Elon Musk
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shows President Barack Obama around the company’s Cape Canaveral rocket processing site in 2010. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

SpaceX’s first-ever at-sea rocket landing was cause for a Twitter celebration that drew in President Barack Obama as well as other space-loving luminaries.

SpaceX used its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket on Friday to send a Dragon cargo capsule on its way to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Minutes later, the rocket’s first stage guided itself back from the edge of space and settled onto an autonomous drone ship, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Today the Dragon is heading toward a rendezvous with the space station, with a robotic-arm grapple maneuver scheduled for about 7 a.m. ET (4 a.m. PT) Sunday. You can watch the operation starting at 5:30 a.m. ET (2:30 a.m. PT) via NASA TV. Meanwhile, the drone ship is making its way back to Port Canaveral, where the rocket stage will be offloaded for testing and probable reuse.

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Wow! SpaceX lands rocket at sea after launch

Image: SpaceX Falcon 9 booster
The first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket stands erect on a drone ship after landing. (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX launched a Dragon cargo capsule today with an expandable module for the International Space Station, and then successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket on an oceangoing platform.

The Atlantic Ocean landing, accomplished after four not-quite-successful attempts, was greeted by wild cheering at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif. “USA! USA!” they chanted.

“This is a really good milestone for the future of spaceflight,” SpaceX’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, told reporters afterward at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. “It’s another step toward the stars.”

It was also the capper for a remarkable comeback.

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SpaceX to deliver pop-up room to space station

Image: BEAM module
An artist’s conception shows the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module attached to the International Space Station. (Credit: Bigelow Aerospace)

For the first time, SpaceX is due to launch an entire room to the International Space Station – a room that can go into orbit folded up, and then be expanded like an accordion once it’s hooked up to the station.

The 3,100-pound Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, or BEAM, is the primary payload for a cargo resupply mission. BEAM will be packed in the “trunk” of SpaceX’s uncrewed Dragon cargo capsule when it’s lofted into space by a Falcon 9 rocket.

Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida is set for 4:43 p.m. ET (1:43 p.m. PT) April 8. Forecaster Kathy Winters said there’s a 90 percent chance of acceptable weather. “It’ll be a great day to launch a rocket,” she told reporters at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

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