3D printed tribute to SpaceX’s successful Falcon 9 rocket landing now available

It was also quite a close call – SpaceX founder Elon Musk initially even believed that the rocket had exploded.

SpaceX then began testing reusable versions of the Falcon 9, eventually gaining enough experience and confidence to fly the rocket’s first stage back for landing attempts during orbital launches. Moments after the orange glow from the returning rocket had faded, a loud sonic boom – generated by the descending booster but arriving after the spectacular light show thanks to the physics of sound – reverberated across the Space Coast.

Blue Origin, another billionaire’s rocket company, successfully landed a booster last month in West Texas. “No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact”, Musk said in a post-launch press conference.

While most rockets are created to burn up on reentry, SpaceX rockets are designed not only to withstand reentry, but also to return to the launch pad or ocean landing site for a vertical landing.

For example, similar boosters cost $60 million to build, but are only used once.

U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said SpaceX’s thrilling landing of a spent rocket after it launched 11 satellites into orbit will transform central Florida.

SpaceX, headed by Internet tycoon Elon Musk, is striving to revolutionize the rocket industry, which now loses many millions of dollars in jettisoned machinery and sophisticated rocket components after each launch. This time, Musk opted for a true land landing. Musk has said an initial probe into the failure pointed to a two-foot-long, inch-thick strut, made by a supplier, in a liquid oxygen tank that snapped. Colonizing Mars would lead to great scientific advances, would drastically lower humanity’s odds of extinction and would be a great “adventure story” that would inspire and intrigue people around the world, Musk said December 15 at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco. SpaceX is leasing the touchdown area – marked by a giant X – from the Air Force.

Indeed, Musk has said repeatedly that he founded SpaceX in 2002 primarily to help make humanity a multiplanet species. But analysts say that SpaceX accomplished a much more hard engineering task with a far bigger rocket that was flying faster and higher.

Musk has preached for some time that reusable-rocket technology is a key technological development that will give space exploration a huge boost by dramatically reducing costs. “A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before”. Satellite companies are developing new technologies that would expand their reach and capabilities. In little more than a decade, the company has upended the aerospace industry, forced its competitors to slash costs, broken an unconscionable contractor monopoly on national-security launches, and prodded some once-moribund peers to try building reusable rockets of their own, after mere decades of talking about it. It hopes to resume supply runs for NASA in February.