SpaceX makes rocket science look easy: Falcon 9 passes tests

The recent historic safe landing of SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral in Florida is widely being seen as a revolutionary step in the field of humans’ future space missions, but Elon Musk has declared that it could still take a few years for the technology t become standard.

It’s a little sooty, but that’s to be expected.

“No damage found, ready to fire again”, he added.

Not only was SpaceX busy, but Jeff Bezos and his own aerospace company, Blue Origin, had previously achieved a similar feat with its own re-usable rocket that it landed back safely to Earth, albeit from a slightly lower altitude than the Falcon 9. Musk previously said the rocket will be shipped back to the launch pad, raised into position and test-fired, but it is not expected to fly again.

Following its spectacular blastoff from the Florida space coast on December 21, the 156 foot tall booster gently touched down vertically with a rocket assisted soft landing some ten minutes later at Landing Zone-1 (LZ-1) on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla.

Another, suitable location for Falcon 9 could be NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex Rocket Garden. On Dec. 23, NASA released a video showing new views of the Falcon 9 landing.

The huge new SpaceX hanger at Launch Complex 39A is meant to process both the existing medium lift Falcon 9 rocket and the new heavy lift Falcon Heavy rocket – which is essentially a tripled barred Falcon 9. Two landing attempts on Just Read the Instructions failed, and Musk said the second was caused when the rocket hit the drone ship too hard, breaking two landing leg stops.

Another company working on developing reusable rockets is Blue Origin, which successfully landed a New Shepard booster from suborbital flight.

The mishap occurred just weeks after the Air Force initially certified Falcon 9 to launch military payloads. Musk says we can expect to see this happen sometime in 2016 as the company has more than a dozen missions scheduled for the next year.