SpaceX was able to celebrate a successful return to flight this week with a picture-perfect launch of the Falcon 9 rocket on January 14, 2017 that successfully delivered a fleet of ten advanced Iridium NEXT mobile voice and data relay satellites to orbit. But the icing on the cake was the dead-center landing and recovery of the Falcon 9 booster on their drone barge (named “Just Read The Instructions”) in the Pacific Ocean, off the west coast of California.
SpaceX released some images from the landing that are absolutely stunning, like this one, below:
The Falcon 9 launched from Space Launch Complex 4E on Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, and the main goal of the mission was to deploy the payload of the first ten Iridium Next communication satellites to low Earth orbit. Iridium plans to eventually have a fleet of 81 such satellites.
It was the first launch for the commercial company since the September 1, 2016 explosion on the launchpad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida during a routine launchpad test. The explosion destroyed the Falcon 9 rocket and the payload of the Amos-6 communications satellite, which had an estimated value of $200 million. The explosion was traced back to a failure of a high-pressure helium vessel inside the Falcon 9’s second-stage liquid-oxygen tank.
Enjoy more images and video from the landing below:
Here’s the full webcast of both the launch and landing:
You can see all of SpaceX’s latest images on their Flickr stream.
Two words.. Awe some !!!!!!!!!!!
Welcome back SpaceX!
Perfect 10 and stuck the landing.
Musk should hire some of the US women gymnastics team as spokeswomen!!
Great photography with the sun silhouetting the ist stage and I could watch that landing video forever. I wonder if SpaceX could add those scrolling films they use on F1 cars to get rid of debris from the lens, with some onboard memory to smooth out the link dropout their videos would be real works of art. Make it a stereo VR camera and they could sell them.
I’d buy that for a quarter!
What’s wrong with me? When the booster landed and the crowd watching at SpaceX HQ started cheering… tears began to run down my face. THAT’s how important these ops are to me. It seems that I’ve been waiting all my life to witness this!
Trump THAT!
Hi Nancy! Great article, as usual. Would it be possible in some way to buy a copy of your new book, and send it to you for a personal inscription? I’ll pay for all the postage, etc.
Thanks!
Bryan
Dr. Bryan Shumaker
NASA/JPL SSA