On Monday, Dec 21, at 8:39 pm EST (5:39
pm PST) those that gathered in Cape Canaveral, Florida, or watched
SpaceX's live feed, were awed by a rare sight when they saw a rocket
ship return to Earth. It was only the second time that a privately
held company successfully landed the first stage of a rocket. The
first was last month when Blue Origin launched a craft into space and
then brought their New
Shepard rocket down for a landing.
SpaceX
employees at the company's Hawthorne headquarters gave high-fives,
cheered and chanted “U.S.A., U.S.A.” after the rocket touched
down on a concrete pad about 10 minutes after the liftoff at 5:29
p.m. Pacific time.
“Welcome
back, baby!” Musk tweeted after the landing.
The successful landing was the third
attempt for the Hawthorn, California-based company. The first attempt
was after a Jan 10 launch when they tried to bring the Falcon back
from space and land it on a barge. The Falcon
9 failed to make it onto the barge due to a malfunction and
crashed. The second
try at landing the Falcon 9 was after a successful mid April
launch. Once again the rocket didn't hit it's mark on the drone barge
and fell into the Ocean. SpaceX was scheduled to make a third attempt
in June but the craft
exploded shortly after launch.
For the six months since that June
accident SpaceX suspended all future launches until they fixed the
problem. Right after that failure the engineering staff went to work
on design flaws in the rocket. The rocket used in the Monday launch
was quite different from the rocket that exploded in June. Those
changes included upgrading the rocket booster to 9 Merlin 1D engines,
a cooled liquid oxygen fuel, and making the rocket taller.
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