Elon Musk has posted a four-panel video of the Falcon re-entry on his Twitter feed and it’s driving even jaded space-watchers into a frenzy.
With all of SpaceX’s success, it’s easy to forget what a long road it’s been to get to this point. Remember in 2001 when Musk wanted to send experimental greenhouses to Mars using refurbished Soviet ICBMs as rockets? And apparently, one of the chief Russian designers spat on him because he was a novice? Good times.
Then remember when Musk and SpaceX decided to build their own rockets, and they had to actually invent a machine to do it, called a friction-stir welder for aluminum-lithium alloy? How about in 2008 when SpaceX launched the world’s first privately-funded, liquid-fueled rocket into orbit?
That’s all SpaceX history now. Now we’re getting accustomed to SpaceX’s reusable rocket boosters and videos of their landings. But this one is still cool, probably because we can watch the video from four angles at once.
And because, let’s face it, space will always be cool. The video speaks for itself. Enjoy.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, Apollo astronauts set up a collection of lunar seismometers…
The dwarf planet Ceres has some permanently dark craters that hold ice. Astronomers thought the…
Cosmic rays are high-energy particles accelerated to extreme velocities approaching the speed of light. It…
NASA is in the business of launching things into orbit. But what goes up must…
A new theory suggests that Titan's majestic dune fields may have come from outer space.…
The BepiColombo mission, a joint effort between JAXA and the ESA, was only the second…