Dragon

Drone Captures Amazing Footage of Falcon 9 Landing

Let’s just take a moment to admire how amazing it is when science fiction becomes routinely real:

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shared this amazing drone footage of the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stage returning for a perfect landing after the launch of the Dragon capsule to the International Space Station. It drops flawlessly through the clouds, easy as pie, touching down at SpaceX’s Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral.

As cool as the first stage landing was, the launch had a notable starting place. As our Ken Kremer reported yesterday, “the era of undesired idleness for America’s most famous launch pad was broken at last by the rumbling thunder of a SpaceX Falcon 9.” The SpaceX launch took place on the historic Launchpad 39-A, the same spot where Apollo astronauts began their journey to the Moon and space shuttles set off on their missions.

Here’s another view of drone footage of the landing:

SpaceX’s CRS-10 resupply mission to the International Space Station was the second successful launch for the commercial space company since the launch pad explosion in September 2016. Dragon will rendezvous and be docked to the ISS, on Wednesday, March 22, bringing about 5,500 pounds of supplies and experiments.

Nancy Atkinson

Nancy has been with Universe Today since 2004, and has published over 6,000 articles on space exploration, astronomy, science and technology. She is the author of two books: "Eight Years to the Moon: the History of the Apollo Missions," (2019) which shares the stories of 60 engineers and scientists who worked behind the scenes to make landing on the Moon possible; and "Incredible Stories from Space: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Missions Changing Our View of the Cosmos" (2016) tells the stories of those who work on NASA's robotic missions to explore the Solar System and beyond. Follow Nancy on Twitter at https://twitter.com/Nancy_A and and Instagram at and https://www.instagram.com/nancyatkinson_ut/

Recent Posts

Fish Could Turn Regolith into Fertile Soil on Mars

What a wonderful arguably simple solution. Here’s the problem, we travel to Mars but how…

1 day ago

New Simulation Explains how Supermassive Black Holes Grew so Quickly

One of the main scientific objectives of next-generation observatories (like the James Webb Space Telescope)…

1 day ago

Don't Get Your Hopes Up for Finding Liquid Water on Mars

In the coming decades, NASA and China intend to send the first crewed missions to…

2 days ago

Webb is an Amazing Supernova Hunter

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just increased the number of known distant supernovae…

2 days ago

Echoes of Flares from the Milky Way’s Supermassive Black Hole

The supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way Galaxy is a quiet…

3 days ago

Warp Drives Could Generate Gravitational Waves

Will future humans use warp drives to explore the cosmos? We're in no position to…

3 days ago