Gadgetory

so looking at it now it looks brand-new it's got a fresh coat of paint you'd never know that it's already been to space so it's 6:00 in the morning we're on our way to see a man about a rocket we're here at Kennedy Space Center to see another SpaceX Falcon 9 launch it's a pretty standard launch for them but that's kind of the point they're sending up a satellite for the company SES but was extra special about this launch is that this Falcon 9 has already been to space this is basically the entire point of SpaceX landing all of its rockets for the last two years they're trying to perfect reusable rockets so what is reusability well it's just like it sounds it's reusing your rocket after launching it seems pretty straightforward but expendable rockets have been more or less than norm since the beginning of rocketry once a rocket takes off it's essentially treated like trash parts of it either stay up in space or fall away to earth and break apart in the ocean the problem with that is that you're throwing away a very expensive investment with each launch rockets cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars to make and with each new mission you have to make an entirely new rocket but reusing rockets especially the most expensive parts like the engines and the propellant tanks can help reduce those hefty costs but it's not so simple as just bringing your rocket back from space in order for a rocket to get to orbit it has to go incredibly fast thousands of miles per hour fast to achieve orbital velocity you're talking about you know seven and a half kilometers per second which is wicked fast and to bring something back from those speeds you have to kind of reverse the process you have to get rid of all of that energy which means a lot of heat a lot of deceleration a lot of pressure that all has to be managed there are a lot of techniques for bringing back vehicles from space such as using wings like the space shuttle or parachutes but what SpaceX is using is a technique called supersonic retropropulsion it's basically using the it's propulsion system what takes the vehicle up to bring it back down again SpaceX doesn't save the entire rocket though it saves the first stage the 14 story core of the Falcon 9 that holds the main engines and most of the fuel once the first stage separates from the top of the rocket it makes a controlled fall back to earth fuel leftover from the launch is used to reignite the engines on the rocket in a series of burns to help the vehicle re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and then slow down for landing grid fins attached to the rocket help to steer it during the descent a big benefit of this method is that it can be scaled up if you want to build a bigger rocket which SpaceX definitely wants to do the future Falcon Heavy is basically three Falcon 9 cores strapped together and all three are designed to come back to earth SpaceX extreme landing 13 of its rockets and so far eight of them have touchdown successfully this one is the second one they've ever landed it sent cargo and supplies to the International Space Station in April of last year and then it returned and made the first-ever drone ship landing and now they're going to try and do that whole process again this one is going to attempt a drone ship landing for the second time this is a pretty straightforward launch for SpaceX it's sending up a satellite for the company ses which is based out of Luxembourg and SES has been very vocal about wanting to be the first ones to fly on a flown booster and they're pretty confident that it's going to go just fine let me tested this thing we've run these engines up we've looked at the airframe we've looked at all of the various different components on this thing and this thing is good to go this we don't believe we're taking an inordinate risk here a lot of people compare it to flying a plane right you wouldn't want to throw away your plane after it flies from New York to Los Angeles of course a plane doesn't have to go to space and back it doesn't have to deal with the same environmental conditions as a rocket each one of these stages the tanks the structure the engines themselves they're going to have to be inspected by the people by the same people that built them in the first place re qualified for flight probably through some ground-based testing before they go again so we're not talking about you know landing a first stage and then within hours or minutes launching that first stage again Plus these stages won't last forever CEO Elon Musk has said that parts of the Falcon 9 can be used up to 100 times but he expects between 10 to 20 relaunches for a single stage however if refurbishment costs are only about a few million dollars then SpaceX could see some cost savings most as a part of the whole foundation from a more standpoint use of the boost age I represent I counted up to the 77 cost of the flight SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell says that she expects a 30% savings for customers that launched on reused Rockets though SpaceX is only offering discounts on the order of 10% for the time being we did receive this guy obviously to fly this there was some interesting there was some incentive to do so but it is not just the money in this particular case it's really let's get this proof-of-concept moving someone has to go first here still when we're talking about millions of dollars that's not an insignificant price dip and any way we can lower costs especially for an industry as expensive as aerospace means more companies can invest in space in the long term it's long been believed in the in this by the space community that if we can make our Rockets reusable we could greatly reduce the cost of access to space we could open the space frontier oh my goodness Vogel has configured for flight minus 10 nine eight seven six five four three two one liftoff of Falcon 9 the world's first free flight that mogul class rocket in the tower whoo today so far is a successful launch of Falcon 9 carrying SES 10 first agents separated from second stage that's what you see on the left-hand side of your screen that's the first stage coming back down one it's been 15 years to get to this point taking us a long time a lot of difficult steps long way but I just incredibly proud of space 16 or able to achieve this incredible milestone in the history of space we still don't really know that economic implications of reusable rockets yet but no matter what this is a watershed moment for the aerospace industry a vertical take-off rocket that can achieve orbit has never really launcher a second time before so no matter what this is a really historic moment for the space industry rocket