A stunning achievement by Elon Musk and the engineers over at SpaceX!
For client Iridium, a communications company, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carrying 10 satellites took off on Sunday from Vandenberg Air Force Base, which is just northwest of Los Angeles.
The ten satellites will be a part of Iridium's NEXT constellation which comprises a total of 75 satellites. The company claims that these satellites will allows any person on the planet to contact anyone else regardless of where they might be on Earth. The rest of the 75 satellites will also be delivered by none other than SpaceX themselves. Approximately an hour after the Falcon 9 rocket launch, SpaceX was successful in deploying all of the ten satellites in the payload.
But as you would come to expect from SpaceX these days, this is not all. Despite the extreme weather conditions which made the task incredibly difficult, SpaceX succeeded in landing the Falcon 9 first stage on it's landing barge. Elon Musk also noted the difficulty of the task by saying that the drone-ship was re-positioned in order to safely land the Falcon 9 rocket.
One of my favorite new additions to the Falcon 9 rockets are the titanium grid fins. The grid fins will steer the rockets when they enter the atmosphere so they reach the surface safely, which will allow the rockets to be re-used and re-furbished at a potentially smaller cost.
This being SpaceX's 13th successful landing, I can say with confidence that they have proved that they can pull off a feat of this scope. Re-use of rockets has been a major achievement of SpaceX which has not only helped turn many skeptics into believers but it also has cut down costs and time for relaunching rockets.
I believe that this competition between NASA and SpaceX will give birth to a modern space-race, but instead of reaching the Moon, it would be a race to Mars. SpaceX has been pulling off these kind of stunning feats for a while. Now, it's time for NASA to step it's game up a bit. But right now, it looks like this mission is another badge on SpaceX's belt!