On Saturday January 10th, SpaceX successfully launched their Dragon cargo spacecraft from Cape Canaveral towards the International Space Station. On Monday, Dragon made successful contact with the ISS and the supplies from the craft were properly transported through the space station. This, however, is something we can already do. The real interest in the mission was not from the piece that went into space, but instead the piece that came back to Earth.
There's a common saying in the aerospace and astrophysics fields; "space is hard." Because space is so difficult, it is increasingly expensive. In order to drastically decrease costs, the launch system (the piece that actually sends the cargo/people into space) needs to be recycled instead of thrown away after each mission. SpaceX is on the verge of engineering a completely reusable rocket (Falcon 9) that will revolutionize the way we send people and supplies into space. Unfortunately the piece that returned to Earth on its 80 mile descent slammed into its landing platform in the Atlantic Ocean at a peak speed of about a mile/second. Boom, no cigar.
In order to direct the rocket to the platform in the ocean, steering rudders were installed, yet it was not equipped with enough fluid to steer the rudders. However, this is a simple fix! Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX, tweeted, "am super proud of my crew for making huge strides towards re-usability on this mission. You guys rock!" SpaceX has plans to increase the rudder fluid quantity and try again on January 29th.
SpaceX is truly leading the industry on cheaper space travel and, in the near future, manned space exploration. Not only does a completely reusable rocket lead to decreased costs, but also more time to innovate and make history.
This is extremely interesting to me. I was never that interested in space travel but like many people I recently watched the movie Interstellar and was instantly fascinated. One thing that I remember thinking after seeing that movie is that it seems like in reality we are so far away from being able to do anything close depicted in the movie. I feel like we need to take a step to be closer to the next big thing in space. I think that making space exploration more economically affordable is the first big step. I had not heard about this SpaceX thing and now I feel more informed about the topic. I also found it interested how something so complicated (space travel) still participated in social media. That just shows how powerful of a tool social media can be!
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