SpaceX fired the engines of its Falcon 9 rocket on its California launch pad on Monday evening, marking a seemingly successful rehearsal for this weekend’s launch of the Jason 3 ocean-monitoring satellite.
But the rocket’s trickiest maneuver – flying its first-stage booster down to a landing on a platform in the Pacific Ocean – can’t be practiced in advance. For that, SpaceX will have to draw upon past experience, including last month’s rocket touchdown in Florida.
Today SpaceX released slick new footage of that launch and landing.
Monday’s static-fire test at Vandenberg Air Force Base was part of SpaceX’s pre-launch routine: Engineers verified that the two-stage rocket’s systems were performing as planned in advance of the launch attempt at 10:42 a.m. PT Sunday. The U.S.-European Jason 3 mission is aimed at measuring sea level from space for at least three to five years, as part of a scientific campaign that goes back decades.
NASA said the results of Monday’s 5:35 p.m. PT test firing would be reviewed today, and SpaceX said the preliminary data “looks good.” The company’s billionaire CEO and founder, Elon Musk, voiced hope that the landing at sea would go forward as well:
Aiming to launch this weekend and (hopefully) land on our droneship. Ship landings needed for high velocity missions https://t.co/n6j0mExAqM
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 12, 2016
Last month’s landing showed that SpaceX could launch a Falcon 9 and then bring the rocket’s first stage back for a touchdown at its Landing Zone 1 in Cape Canaveral, Fla. But as Musk pointed out, in some cases the only option for rocket reuse is to recover the rocket downrange at sea. SpaceX tried to execute a rocket landing on an autonomous drone ship twice last year. Both attempts came close to success but ended in fiery crashes.
Musk says he’ll keep trying despite those setbacks. Rocket landings are a key part of SpaceX’s strategy to drive down the cost of space access to as little as 1 percent of its current level. That cost reduction, in turn, is a key part of Musk’s vision to send thousands of colonists to Mars and turn humanity into a multiplanet species.
