© 2024 Connecticut Public

FCC Public Inspection Files:
WEDH · WEDN · WEDW · WEDY · WNPR
WPKT · WRLI-FM · WEDW-FM · Public Files Contact
ATSC 3.0 FAQ
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

SpaceX Reuses A Rocket To Launch A Satellite

This photo, made available by SpaceX Thursday, shows the company's Falcon 9 rocket launching from Kennedy Space Center's historic Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
SpaceX
This photo, made available by SpaceX Thursday, shows the company's Falcon 9 rocket launching from Kennedy Space Center's historic Pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Updated 7:55 p.m. ET

The most expensive part of doing business in outer space is getting there. The private space flight company SpaceX thinks it can change all that, and Thursday's successful reuse of a rocket was a big test of its business model.

SpaceX launched a communications satellite from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a rocket stage that had already been to space and back. SpaceX is betting that this kind of recycling will lower its costs and revolutionize space flight.

The rocket landed vertically on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean a few minutes after the launch.

The first stage from last year's launch landed vertically on a barge at sea.
/ SpaceX
/
SpaceX
The first stage from last year's launch landed vertically on a barge at sea.

The aerospace industry essentially has been throwing away its hefty rockets. Partway into orbit, the big, expensive first stage falls off and plunges back to Earth.

It's a unique business model within the transportation sector, says Bobby Braun, the dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He says to see how strange it is, imagine flying from Denver to Washington, D.C.: "When I got there, the airline wouldn't throw away that airplane and put me on a new one to bring me back a few days later," he says.

Braun says there have been attempts to reuse rockets before, most notably the space shuttle, which could be relaunched multiple times. But he says the shuttle was a complex machine that was expensive to run. "It required a standing army of people to keep it operational," he says.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk thinks that reusing the much simpler stages from his Falcon 9 rockets will also save money: "I try to tell my team to imagine that there was a pallet of cash that was plummeting through the atmosphere, and it was going to burn up and smash into tiny pieces, would you try to save it? Probably yes," he told attendees of last year's Code Conference.

That philosophy is why SpaceX rockets don't crash back to Earth. Instead, they come back and land vertically on a ship in the middle of the ocean (the rockets also can land at the launch site). The company's first ocean landing happened almost exactly a year ago, and Thursday it took that exact same rocket and launched it again.

"This is indeed a first," says Michele Franci, the chief technology officer of Inmarsat, a London company that runs a satellite network for tracking ships and planes. Inmarsat is a SpaceX customer, and Franci says if launch costs come down, companies like his could launch more satellites, more often, and build a better network.

But he says that to really bring prices down, SpaceX will have to recycle each rocket more than just once.

"The question is how many times they can reuse each individual rocket, and how often they can do it," he says.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Corrected: March 31, 2017 at 12:00 AM EDT
A previous version of this post referred to the College of Engineering and Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. In fact, it is the College of Engineering and Applied Science.
Geoff Brumfiel works as a senior editor and correspondent on NPR's science desk. His editing duties include science and space, while his reporting focuses on the intersection of science and national security.

Stand up for civility

This news story is funded in large part by Connecticut Public’s Members — listeners, viewers, and readers like you who value fact-based journalism and trustworthy information.

We hope their support inspires you to donate so that we can continue telling stories that inform, educate, and inspire you and your neighbors. As a community-supported public media service, Connecticut Public has relied on donor support for more than 50 years.

Your donation today will allow us to continue this work on your behalf. Give today at any amount and join the 50,000 members who are building a better—and more civil—Connecticut to live, work, and play.

Related Content