The Falcon has landed..... It's On a Boat!!!

04/09/2016

The Falcon has landed..... It's On a Boat!!! 

 Yesterday April 8, 2016 SpaceX had another historic launch with an even bigger finishing move. At T-minus 0 the Falcon 9 v1.2 full thrust rocket filled with Highly refined RP-1 liquid kerocene and super chilled to almost absolute zero Liquid oxygen roared to life and started it historic journey. Topped by the SpaceX Dragon cargo craft filled with nearly 7,000 lbs of cargo, equipment, supplies and food stuffs bound for the crew of Expedition 42 onboard the ISS.

 As stated in a previous post in the exterior cargo trunk section was the BEAM by Bigelow Aerospace. BEAM is short for Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, which is a working demonstration for future expandable habitats that are being developed by the NewSpace firm in conjunction with NASA as a potential supplier of habitats for NASA's Deep Space Exploration mission that will be launched by the Heavy variant of the SLS Space Launch System.

 SpaceX the Hawthorne California based NewSpace firms CEO and CTO Elon Musk's mission is to drive down the cost of launch vehicles for re-usability. And landing the Falcon 9 first stage and Falcon Heavy boosters is fullfilling this mandate. And SpaceX inched ever so closer to this goal by finally succeeding in landing the Falcon 9 booster on their Automated Spaceport Drone Ship " Of Course I Still Love You ".

 And the photos below show just how sweet that victory is!!! Can't wait for the re-firing of this booster back at KSC to see how the data comes out. Never the less it was a beautiful " Return to Flight " for the Dragon.

Photo Credit: SpaceX Youtube