What Musk’s SpaceX just DID is SHOCKED the whole industry cause NO ONE HAD DONE IT BEFORE…
Can you believe that one day, seeing a rocket land becomes a very normal sighting, similar to that of seeing airplanes land every hour?
Sounds ridiculous, right?
But that’s exactly what SpaceX is doing now.
This definitely comes as a shock for the entire space industry.
Why shock?
Hang on there till the end of this script as I explain all the reasons for that?
Now, let’s get started:
Well, it’s hard to make a profit in space. Moving “stuff” from Earth into space is an expensive process. But this is because we haven’t learned how to recycle rockets yet.
Since the launch of Sputnik started the space age 60 years ago, most of the spacecraft that have been launched are Expendable Launch Vehicles (ELVs), which only fly once. After delivering their payload, they either come crashing back down to Earth, burn up in the atmosphere, or simply remain in orbit as “space junk”.
Every time a new payload needs to be sent into space, a new ELV has to be built, costing millions of dollars. Imagine how much an Uber would cost if the driver had to buy a new car for every trip!
It might seem that the obvious solution is to reuse rockets. The idea of Reusable Launch Vehicles (RLVs) isn’t new, but reusing rockets has proven tricky in the past.
The first real attempt at making an RLV was NASA’s Space Shuttle program.
The Space Shuttle fleet was meant to lower the cost of space transportation by being partially reusable. But rather than lowering costs, the program increased them. The complexity and risk of the Space Shuttle fleet made maintaining and operating them expensive. And when the 30-year program ended in 2011, it may have seemed like the argument for RLVs ended with it.
But proponents of RLVs were undeterred.
A few months after the final Space Shuttle flight, SpaceX, a start-up company founded by tech billionaire Elon Musk announced a plan to make its Falcon 9 rocket reusable. SpaceX began working on ways to recover and reuse the Falcon 9’s booster stage, the largest, most expensive part of the rocket.
Two years later, the company began trying to recover used boosters by having them make controlled descents into the ocean after completing their missions. After some spectacular failures, SpaceX successfully recovered a booster for the first time in late 2015.
What Musk’s SpaceX just DID is SHOCKED the whole industry cause NO ONE HAD DONE IT BEFORE…
