This morning, Israeli time, Elon Musk's company SpaceX recorded an unprecedented achievement, which is a huge victory for the serial entrepreneur who is often considered crazy. ChatGPT helps us tell about the achievement and the long road that led to it:
22 minutes before midnight Florida time, or a similar number of minutes before 7 a.m. Here, a Falcon 9 rocket was launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Base, carrying 22 new satellites to join the Starlink satellite internet network operated by Musk's company. Admittedly, another 22 satellites are no longer an unusual event for the company, which has already launched no fewer than 4,700 of them and asked permission to increase the number to 30,000 in the coming years. What was special about this particular launch was not the payload, but the missile on which it was launched.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 — the main part of the rocket, which creates the enormous thrust needed to pull the payload out of Earth's gravity — landed just under 8.5 minutes after launch right in the center of a landing pad on a SpaceX boat in the ocean. This landing broke a new record – because it was the 17th time that this particular missile was launched and returned safely, in preparation for reuse in future launches.
To appreciate the magnitude of this achievement, we need to go back to the early days of SpaceX. Elon Musk's vision of reducing the cost of space travel by reusing rockets was met with skepticism from many who did not believe it was possible, including experts. Launch missiles were considered disposable, and after each launch, the missile used for its execution was destroyed on landing (and therefore they were traditionally carried out at sea), and the next launch was carried out by a new missile, and again and again.
SpaceX's quest to prove that rockets can be safely landed and reused has been fraught with challenges and failures. Some of the early attempts to land rockets safely ended in spectacular explosions and crashes. After each and every one of them, Musk tried to come himself to examine the remnants with his rocket scientists, in order to think together how to prevent a crash next time. One of the most striking and spectacular examples to watch is the fourth attempt to land a Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. The rocket's legs failed to maintain contact with the floating landing pad, and in front of the cameras the missile began to bounce and tilt sideways, until it fell and exploded.
Today, less than a decade later, the whole world is already taking SpaceX's complete rocket landers for granted. Even their accuracy, which is increasing (last year it reached centimeters, when one of the missiles landed on a robotic arm that was already preparing it for the next launch), is received with relative indifference.
The rocket usage record wasn't the only record SpaceX broke this morning: it was its 65th launch this year, up from 61 last year. By the end of the year, that record is expected to be broken again, and probably more than once.
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