SpaceX completes difficult barge landing for second time

SpaceX has been a trailblazer when it comes to reusable rocket technology, and the company was able to reach another milestone in that pursuit, landing one of its Falcon-9 rockets at sea after launching for the second time ever.

The Falcon-9 rocket returned to a floating platform off the Florida coast just a couple minutes after it dispatched a Japanese communications satellite. SpaceX first accomplished that feat in April.

This most recent effort was all the more remarkable because this booster rocket was moving much faster during its descent to Earth. SpaceX has said retrieving boosters that deliver geostationary satellites will almost always be very difficult due to the high speed necessary to put those assets in the correct section of the sky.

“May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted after the recent rocket landing.

Adding to the company’s success

The SpaceX lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station occurred at 1:21 a.m. EST. The Japanese communications satellite separated the Falcon’s upper-stage, which is not recovered, 32 minutes after launch. The JCSAT-14 was designed to send telecommunications signals across the Asia-Pacific region.

The mission had initially been delayed each day due to poor weather over that section of Florida.

SpaceX has now maneuvered three boosters back to Earth. The company’s first good landing result was in December, when it delivered a rocket stage to a site near to the Florida launch location. However, it is the ocean landings on drone barges that SpaceX is wants to perfect, as many of its missions are expected to require a sea-based landing. Delivering satellites to geostationary orbit demands a great deal of performance from the Falcon-9 rocket, and that energy then has to be eliminated prior to it making a landing.

It is not just the speed at which the rocket is moving that must be decreased, SpaceX also had to address the stress and heating on components that comes with the launch process.

If SpaceX can retrieve, repair and re-fly rockets it ought to be able to provide its customers lower-cost launches than competitors like Blue Origin.

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Image credit: SpaceX/Flickr

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