Will seeing a spaceship land on its feet ever get old? The novelty is still there in newly released videos from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX, showing new perspectives on their most recent rocket landings.
Blue Origin’s video recaps the April 2 flight of its New Shepard suborbital space vehicle, as seen from a camera pointing out from one of the booster’s vents. The 2:38 clip begins with a shot of the curving blue Earth below the blackness of space – a view that paying passengers could see as early as 2018.
Then there’s the supersonic descent back through the atmosphere. If you look closely at the full-frame, high-definition video, you might be able to pick out the Rio Grande River running through the West Texas landscape surrounding Blue Origin’s launch and landing site.
Bezos, the Seattle billionaire who founded Blue Origin as well as the Amazon retail powerhouse, pointed out a detail you might have otherwise missed when he provided a sneak preview at last month’s Space Symposium in Colorado:
“The big round structure at the top, which you can just barely see, is our ring fin, which … provides stability for re-entry. … The leading edge of the ring fin is going to marshmallow a nice toasty brown here. Peak G’s on re-entry are about 5 G’s,” he said.
Bezos said it cost about $2,000 to refurbish the New Shepard after the flight. That includes the cost of fixing the ring fin. “That leading edge will get sanded off, and we’ll reapply thermal protection,” Bezos said. “We never took the engine out of the vehicle.”
Meanwhile, SpaceX shared three more camera angles from last week’s at-sea landing of its Falcon 9 first-stage booster – a high-energy touchdown that took place after the rocket sent a Japanese telecommunications satellite toward geosynchronous transit orbit.
The 1:29 clip combines webcam views from the autonomous drone ship known as “Of Course I Still Love You,” which was stationed hundreds of miles offshore in the Atlantic Ocean. After several days of transit time, the ship was brought back to shore Monday night at Port Canaveral, Fla.
From there, the booster will be trucked to SpaceX’s Florida processing facility, near Launch Pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. It’ll join two other first-stage boosters that made successful landings, and if the hardware checks out, it could well be used again.
#SpaceX #Falcon9 returns to Port Canaveral after #JCSAT14 mission stay tuned to @SpaceflightIns for updates! pic.twitter.com/5EEkhZQeVf
— SpaceFlight Insider (@SpaceflightIns) May 10, 2016
Rocket reusability is important to SpaceX founder Elon Musk, and to Bezos as well. Both of them say being able to reuse hardware will drive down the cost of access to space, just as reusable airplanes help keep the cost of commercial aviation relatively low.
Cheaper spaceflight should bring both billionaires’ space dreams closer to reality. Bezos’ goal is to have millions of people living and working in space, while Musk aims to turn humanity into a multiplanet species by sending thousands of settlers to Mars.
