Fifteen years in the making. That was a comment repeated several times by Elon Musk during a presser, or press conference, shortly after SpaceX had done what no one had done before, reusing a first stage booster of an orbital rocket that had been previously safely returned from another mission.
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SpaceX and its customers can breathe a sigh of relief today after an instantaneous launch went off without a glitch. The Falcon 9 lifted off at 12:54 p.m. EST and began deploying the first of 10 Iridium satellites 59 minutes later. At 2:13 p.m. EST SpaceX reported that all of the Iridium satellites had been deployed successfully.
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Today at 12:54 p.m. EST, SpaceX should return to flight with the launch of a Falcon 9 on the Iridium 1 mission, if all goes well. There’s a lot riding on this mission, and not just for SpaceX.
Read More »At 3:44 a.m. EDT a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the Dragon spacecraft successfully lifted off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Space Station launch complex 40 for its maiden voyage to the International Space Station on its second demonstration flight as part of the NASA Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program.
Read More »During inspections, SpaceX engineers traced the cause of yesterdays launch scrub to a faulty check valve on the Merlin engine. Having discovered the problem SpaceX replaced the valve last night and continue to review data from the aborted launch with the aim of trying again on Tuesday morning.
Read More »SpaceX’s proposal to accelerate evolution of the Dragon spacecraft to a crew transportation system.
Read More »This is a 2:46 video of the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on-orbit starting at the T00:53:50 minute mark.
Read More »Other than watching the video of the launch there’s nothing like seeing great still images of an event. These images provided by SpaceX and Chris Thompson show the spectacular liftoff, on-orbit images and splashdown images.
Read More »After a nearly flawless launch of Falcon 9 and recovery of the Dragon spacecraft, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was almost speechless during the first part of the press conference saying “he was in semi shock” at how well the launch went. Musk said he was extremely thankful to NASA for helping get SpaceX to this point and that SpaceX had built upon decades of NASA …
Read More »Heading into the first demo flight of NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program SpaceX and NASA were both quick to remind people that this was a test program doing something SpaceX had never done before. From the look of today’s launch it seems they needed have worried so much. The first flight of Falcon 9 carrying the Dragon spacecraft to orbit appears to have …
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