Monday, December 21, 2015

SpaceX / Elon Musk - Huge Success with Soft-Landing of Falcon 9 Booster (video)

Robert Heinlein wrote of Delos D. Harriman, 'the man who sold the Moon,' and that's an excellent story too but first you have to get there.  The latest version of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle is the biggest SpaceX has ever tried to soft landing and the amazement of the success was tonight's launch from Cape Canaveral was not a test.  The vehicle launched eleven satellites into Earth orbit and the Falcon 9 booster returned safely to Earth.

Excited congratulations to Elon Musk and everyone at SpaceX on the first recovery of a production launch vehicle.  Jeff Bezos from Amazon also achieved a soft landing of a booster recently but that was not a production launch and it's not clear if that launch matched the extreme of this one.



You have to be a hard-core space nuthead to watch the whole thing but it's fascinating stuff if you like because this covers the entire launch.  The first half hour is background information and interviews but you may want to get straight to the blastoff.

Start the video at +31:00 if you want to skip to just before the launch.

The booster returns to a successful landing in about 13-14 minutes and you may want to hang through the whole thing because the whoop of excitement which went up from a large crowd was a beautiful thing.


As one who watched NASA's Mercury launches when they were broadcast live, seeing this is a marvel.  There are only two companies which have ever accomplished this successfully and both of the are homegrown American.  Elon Musk is the real world vision of Delos D. Harriman.  When the first private corporation successfully lands on the Moon or Mars, it sure looks like Elon Musk and SpaceX will be doing it.

No comments: