The world watched in awe as SpaceX accomplished a feat – one that no one had ever done before.
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We have witnessed many launches which have taken humans to not just the moon but beyond. And with every one of those takeoffs, viewers fixated their eyes on the shuttle as it tore through the atmosphere, leaving behind nothing but compartments whose sole purpose was fuel.
But, this one? This one was different. As the rocket entered its later stages, every eye turned towards the automated landing that took place on the 21st of December 2015.
Pick a man or a woman off the street and have them consider developments being done in space exploration, and the first thing they’ll ask you is: “How far can the rocket go?” But, not Elon Musk, the CEO and face of SpaceX. He, in his quest for affordable space travel, went with reusability in mind.
Many have watched the recovery of Falcon 9’s first stage. But, only a few know what it took to reach such a level of perfection. The end result was reached through a process of twenty landing attempts and constant tweaks at every stage, leaving no room for error. The first stage of Falcon 9 (a multi-stage rocket) was a mammoth in itself, standing at one hundred and forty feet tall with twelve feet in diameter. Imagine a Boeing 737, the world’s best-selling commercial jetliner in history, and you can get a rough estimate of its size.
It is important to note that the first stage (S1) goes well out of the atmosphere before detaching from the main framework. To enable manoeuvring here, S1 was equipped with cold gas thrusters. Once it descends into the atmosphere, grid fins – wing-like structures – are deployed to take advantage of the aerodynamic forces now present, and to help steer it towards the landing pad. This process is constantly improved upon by deep learning (a method by which machines learn data representations).
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But, what does this mean for the future? First of all, reacquiring the first stage enables SpaceX to recover huge resources which would be otherwise lost. In financial terms, refuelling costs around two hundred thousand dollars – a pittance compared to the estimated sixty-million-dollar expense of building a new rocket from scratch. If we are to think about trips to worlds beyond earth, we will have to set up systems that are first efficient and then, “high tech”. An event of this calibre would serve as a catalyst for future cutting-edge development. New private companies, such as Blue Origin (owned by Elon Musk’s fellow billionaire Jeff Bezos), have come up in hopes of improving upon what SpaceX did. This garners a sense of competitiveness which would go a long way for the betterment of space exploration. We, on the other hand, get to sit back and enjoy the experience.
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