{"id":182088,"date":"2015-12-22T20:47:00","date_gmt":"2015-12-23T01:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/22\/it-took-long-enough\/"},"modified":"2015-12-22T20:47:00","modified_gmt":"2015-12-23T01:47:00","slug":"it-took-long-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2015\/12\/22\/it-took-long-enough\/","title":{"rendered":"It Took Long Enough"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"border: 1px solid black; float: right; margin: 0px 10px; padding: 5px; text-align: center; width: 360px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" allowfullscreen=\"\" frameborder=\"0\" height=\"197\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/ZCBE8ocOkAQ\" width=\"350\"><\/iframe><i><\/i><\/div>\n<p>SpaceX has <a href=\"http:\/\/aviationweek.com\/space\/spacex-nails-falcon-9-first-stage-landing\">finally managed to safely land a first stage on their booster<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">SpaceX engineers and on-board software maneuvered the first stage of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle back to a steady, tail-down landing at Cape Canaveral Monday, 10 min. after returning the kerosene-fueled rocket to flight following an ascent explosion on a mission to the International Space Station in June.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Success in recovering the stage, after two unsuccessful attempts to land on a barge in the Atlantic, marks a major step toward the long-sought dream of reusable commercial space launchers. While Blue Origin brought its liquid-hydrogen\/liquid oxygen New Shepard vehicle back from a suborbital launch to space on Nov. 23, Monday\u2019s SpaceX recovery was the first known landing for an unmanned orbital launcher.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Silicon Valley venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson, an early SpaceX backer, tweeted \u201cCongrats @SpaceX for landing the rocket back on land!!!! Incredible!!! One giant leap!\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The landing at a surplus launch pad on Cape Canaveral AFS, Florida, came in the middle of three significant milestones for commercial spaceflight. For SpaceX, it marked a return to flight for the Falcon 9 launch vehicle that is the linchpin of the company\u2019s business in the near term. For its customer, Orbcomm, it completed launching of a 17-spacecraft low Earth orbit (LEO) constellation of second-generation Machine-to-Machine \u201cOG2\u201d satellites.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Although only a secondary test objective on the Orbcomm-2 mission, landing the Falcon 9 stage at Launch Complex 13 on Cape Canaveral \u2014  a surplus Atlas launch site designed \u201cLanding Complex 1\u201d by SpaceX \u2014 was a major achievement for the Hawthorne, California-based company.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I am dubious as to the ultimate significance of the reusable stage.<\/p>\n<p>At least some of the potential savings is eaten up by the additional fuel that needs to be carried to fly home, as are any arrangements for a landing site, with its associated blockhouse and firefighting equipment.<\/p>\n<p>We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>SpaceX has finally managed to safely land a first stage on their booster: SpaceX engineers and on-board software maneuvered the first stage of a Falcon 9 launch vehicle back to a steady, tail-down landing at Cape Canaveral Monday, 10 min. after returning the kerosene-fueled rocket to flight following an ascent explosion on a mission to &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1007,1128,1037,1025,1027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182088","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aviation","category-propulsion","category-space","category-technology","category-video"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182088"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182088"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182088\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182088"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182088"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182088"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}