SpaceX, a private space launch company owned by Elon Musk, test fired one of its landed Falcon 9 rockets on July 28 at the Rocket Development and Test Facility in McGregor, Texas.
It was for the first time that the company successfully managed to test fire a landed rocket. The test became a cleavage to an important information -- how rockets cope with repeated burns caused during lift off.
Since December last year, SpaceX has landed five of its rockets successfully, both on land and on barges, but didn't relaunch any of them. Musk says that he looks forward to the day when launches will be prevalent, common and no longer newsworthy. However, for him, successful recapture of the rockets remain the first step in the right direction. According to him, it is the relaunch part of the equation that is essential and will pave the way for more affordable space travel. SpaceX had announced in June that it will be relaunching four of its successful rockets this fall, the Fortune reported.
Saving money remains a driving factor in rocket relaunch. President and COO of SpaceX Gwynne Shot well said that she hopes reuse of rockets will bring down the cost of a launch by as much as a third, which costs around $61 million.
An astronomer, Jonathan McDowell from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said that reaching the point where not only recovering the rockets in one piece but also reusing them become possible is an achievement in itself, the Christian Science Monitor reported. But he said getting a customer to pay for such launch is the hardest part. Since 1989, McDowell has been publishing a twice-monthly report which tracks space launches called Jonathan's Space Report.
McDowell went on to say that the tricky part initially will be how the company builds trust and provides safety records so as to convince the other companies to not only pay for the launch of a used rocket but also send their expensive satellites and other stuff along with it. The recent test fire will certainly help SpaceX in building that trust.
The Falcon 9 rocket used in last week's test was previously used in May to deliver JCSAT-14 communications satellite into space. Despite the fact that it was successfully recovered, the rocket is not expected to return to space again.
However, like most of Musk's ventures, SpaceX has aspiring plans for the future. Its ultimate goal being landing humans on Mars. That may still be a distant dream, but the company's short term plans are to launch a triple rocket called Falcon Heavy and the first of its kind commercial reuse of another Falcon 9 rocket in a delivery mission to the International Space Station.