FIFTH time's the charm. On April 8th SpaceX, an American rocketry firm founded by Elon Musk, completed one of its resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS). The journey is now a routine operation: the eighth such mission the company has flown, although one failed to reach orbit. This launch, though, was more interesting than most, for two reasons.
One was that the Falcon 9 rocket was carrying a nifty new inflatable module designed to attach to the ISS (see article). The second was that, following four previous failures, SpaceX at last managed to recover the first stage of its rocket by landing it on a platform on a drone ship stationed in the Atlantic.
It was a spectacular manoeuvre, with the rocket’s first stage detaching itself as the second stage carried on into orbit. It required the first stage to flip itself around and re-light its engines to slow itself down. Using a mixture of rocket power and its fins, the first stage guided itself back through the atmosphere to land upright...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1SWyE8R
EmoticonEmoticon