There are a lot of good-looking things in this world, but sometimes the majority incredible feats to witness are the example of human accomplishment, those times when we mere mortals just nail something - whether it's a ideal water bottle flip or landing a reusable spacecraft on a balanced barge in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
That last one is precisely what SpaceX managed to do perfectly previous Friday, for the third spectacular time in a row. But this time, they also at large footage of the landing filmed from on-board their Falcon 9 rocket, so it looks like you're riding back down to Earth with the booster. And oh man, it's high-quality. It's so, so good.
The sped-up footage shows the rocket fast ascending to high geostationary orbit, which is more than 35,000 km (22,000 miles) above Earth's equator.That last one is precisely what SpaceX managed to do perfectly previous Friday, for the third spectacular time in a row. But this time, they also at large footage of the landing filmed from on-board their Falcon 9 rocket, so it looks like you're riding back down to Earth with the booster. And oh man, it's high-quality. It's so, so good.
At this point in a launch, the first period booster is usually dropped back into the ocean, never to be used once more, but instead, SpaceX lands that first stage on a barge so it can be improved and used again, saving millions and millions of dollars in the process.
That sounds easy enough, but when you watch the rocket descend from the huge heights of space all the way down to a awfully precise 'X marks the spot' on SpaceX's unmanned barge - adorably called Of Course I Still Love You - you'll get a sense of presently how tough it is.
And it's not only breath-taking to watch, it's also reason for celebration. Building a regular rocket that can create it into space is hard (and expensive) enough, but what SpaceX has done is even extra challenging - it's built a reusable rocket that can bring spacecraft or cargo into orbit, then make it home again, over and over once more.
In the long term, that reusable rocket is leaving to be crucial to bringing down the cost of space travel, and it could also lead to a number of pretty exciting new possibilities, such as the opportunity to bring our astronauts home from Mars.
But, in the small term, it's been damn hard, and SpaceX has suffered some pretty unsatisfactory failures lessons in the process.
As this footage shows, it's at the present managed to perfect the landing process, creation a very convincing argument that, for the opening time ever, reusable rockets will be in our future. And we can't wait to see what's leaving to happen next.
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