An optimistic news coming from the California based aerospace manufacturer and space transport service provider SpaceX. The Elon Musk captained company has successfully conducted the static test firing of a recovered Falcon 9 first stage.
The company has always been eager to reuse its recovered rockets and their latest venture may turn out to be a pioneer step towards actually re-using recovered rocket components for an actual paying customer.
The company tweets;
Prepping to fly again — recovered CRS-8 first stage completed a static fire test at our McGregor, TX rocket development facility last week.
Prepping to fly again — recovered CRS-8 first stage completed a static fire test at our McGregor, TX rocket development facility last week. pic.twitter.com/QEtKVJ1Jhc
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) February 1, 2017
Along with the tweets, the company also posted photographs of the Falcon 9 first-stage rocket, which it recovered from its April’s CRS-8 International Space Station resupply mission, which is its first successful venture of recovering a rocket from its ocean-borne floating drone ship landing pads. The SpaceX founder and owner Elon Musk stated that at the time of recovery, it was ‘likely’ that the booster would qualify for further use. Enthusiastically, he also predicted a time frame of June 2016, for the reuse mission, which appeared to be a fiasco.
Apart from Musk’s overenthusiastic timeline predictions, SpaceX also faced a set back in September 2016, when its Falcon 9 exploded on the launch pad itself. This incident ceased the all of its flight activities for around five months.
Spacex may put the booster into action for its mission with SES, a European satellite company, which could be real soon. The estimates say that the launch may take place as early as March. during its return on the launch pad with Iridium-1 mission earlier this month, the company stated that the reuse mission will happen “soon”.
Present day rockets are likely to last for two to three reuses before they are actually retired, and SpaceX believes the reuse of the first stage will allow some cost cuttings, saving 30 percent per launch. The step is sufficient to surge a revolution in space transportation.
