I repeat: SpaceX has landed a freaking rocket on a robot boat in the dark.
Defying its own predictions, the Hawthorne-based commercial spaceflight company has safely brought a Falcon 9 from the edge of space—where it was traveling at nearly six times the speed of sound—to a stationary platform floating several hundred miles off the coast of Florida. Safe and sound.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk was skeptical this was possible, because the rocket's payload, a communications satellite, was heading to an orbital altitude of 22,300 miles. Which means the rocket would be coming home very, very hot. "It wants to melt," he said at an earlier press event. Just before launch, he put the odds of a successful landing at "maybe even."
SpaceX is incrementally moving towards making landings such as these mundane. Every rocket they land saves them tens of millions of dollars. It also means they shortens the wait time between each launch. The company recovered its first Falcon 9 about a month ago, and plans to do its first reuse sometime this summer. Musk also believes SpaceX will be launching several times a month by the end of the summer.
It's okay to get excited. In fact, it's not okay to not get excited. This is amazing. But...but. SpaceX is probably going to fail eventually. Which is cool. Failure is a necessary prerequisite for success. Especially when you're talking about space. Especially when you're trying to land rockets on freaking barges in the middle of the night.
Oh yeah, one more thing: The Falcon 9's payload—a Japanese communications satellite—is making its way to orbit just fine. Mission accomplished, times two.
