New successful landing of a rocket SpaceX – Le Figaro

VIDEOS – SpaceX has successfully completed the sixth landing of one of its Falcon 9 rocket and should relaunch a first floor recovered in this way before the end of the year

with six successful landings (and still 5 failures), the US company SpaceX really starting to control what appears there are still a few months as a feat: ask first stage of a rocket to the vertical for reuse. Sunday, August 14, a Falcon 9 launch vehicle has successfully put into geostationary transfer orbit a telecommunications satellite, JCST-16, and its first stage landed nine minutes after takeoff in the center of the target on an autonomous barge in the Atlantic Ocean, 600 km east of Cape Canaveral no shot.

The return of a mission from geostationary orbit is more complicated than for a low orbit, because the first floor should burn almost all its fuel to propel high enough the second floor, and so has less reserve to brake and back down to Earth. It is for this reason that the rocket landed on a barge at sea, not near the launch pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida, which was too far away. The return of pitcher a shot into geostationary orbit is also strained, as it heats up more when reentering the atmosphere at nearly 6300 km / h.

purpose of the company created by the American industrialist Elon Musk is obviously to reduce the cost of access to space. By reusing a first floor (and its new engines, the most expensive elements of the launcher) SpaceX should offer price inaccessible to competitors (Arianespace and Russian Proton particular). But for this, it will prove that the recovered rockets are able to fly again, with sufficient reliability, without the need for complex and costly maintenance on the engines.

A first floor that was fired, and landed successfully in May 2016 and successfully tested this summer on the test center SpaceX Texas. Three times nine Merlin engines were turned on at full power, with the rocket anchored with a mooring system. The pitcher should be reused first, in the coming months, will be the one who won a cargo Dragon capsule to the International Space Station (ISS) in April. But neither the date nor the customer of this flight have so far been announced by SpaceX.