SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

SpaceX

Elon Musk had himself a day Thursday. For the first time in history, his company launched a fully reusable first stage of an orbital rocket. Then, for good measure, SpaceX landed that rocket for a second time on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean. Finally—because why not, when you're on a roll—he attempted to safely return the $6 million payload fairing at the top of the rocket. Even that met with at least partial success. "This is a huge day," he commented later. "My mind's blown, frankly."

Many minds were blown on Thursday as the 10-story tall first stage launched for the second time, hefting a 4,300kg payload on its way to a geostationary orbit about 36,000km above the Earth, and then returning to the planet. Blue Origin has done this with the much smaller, suborbital New Shepard rocket. NASA's space shuttle was mostly reusable—but also the product of a multibillion government program. On Thursday a private company, having invested more than $1 billion of its own funds, reused a large, complicated rocket.

Thursday, Musk clearly felt he had finally pushed spaceflight across the rubicon of reusable rocketry, and permanently changed the aerospace industry, and he said he is now confident the company can reach its goal of 24-hour reusability. "So it has been 15 years to get to this point, it took us a long time," he said. "A lot of difficult steps along the way. This is going to be ultimately a huge revolution in spaceflight."

The dawn of commercial space

For some in the aerospace industry, such talk does not seem hyperbole. Bobby Braun, who served as NASA's first chief technologist and now serves as dean of the College of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Colorado-Boulder, said the achievement ranks high in the annals of aviation and aerospace feats. "I think that 50 years from now we'll look back on this day and that's say where commercial space travel began," he said.

Braun compared Thursday's reflight of the Falcon 9 rocket to the commercial debut of Boeing's 707 aircraft. This plane, a gamble by Boeing to translate its success as World War II aviation contractor into private air travel, made its first commercial flight from New York to Paris in October 1958. Within a decade air travel exploded in popularity across the country, as metro areas built airport terminals, runways, baggage handling services, and more elements of modern commercial aviation. Reusable rockets have the potential to fulfill the same role for space transportation, Braun said.

While he did not dismiss the achievements of Blue Origin during the last 18 months, when the company flew the same booster five times for short, suborbital flights, Braun said SpaceX's achievement surpasses that in a significant way. A rocket launching an orbital payload, like the Falcon 9 first stage, produces about 10 times as much energy, which has to be reversed during the return to Earth. That requires technologies such as supersonic retropropulsion, the firing of the rocket's engines in an opposite direction at speeds greater than sound. The feasibility of such a technology had been theoretical before SpaceX came along and made it practical.

Competition

SpaceX, of course, has become a competitor to Boeing in the aerospace industry. Until recently, the major players in aerospace had looked askance at SpaceX, its big-talking chief executive, and the company's sky high ambitions. Now, the company has not only landed eight boosters that have flown to space, it has launched one—and is promising to do the same five or six more times just this year. Reflying the first stage alone saves about 70 percent of the cost of a rocket launch. And the company has plans to eventually recycle its payload fairing and second stages, as well.

"I think, hopefully, this will inform the decisions of other space organizations," Musk said Thursday night, during a news conference. "Reusability has been put forth as really too hard, or not really feasible. Now, in order to be competitive in launch costs, I think it's going to be necessary for other companies to do the same thing. Imagine if we were an aircraft company selling aircraft that could be flown many times, and everyone else was selling aircraft that could be flown once, I mean, you know, that's not a very competitive position to be in."

After the successful launch Thursday Tory Bruno, the chief executive of United Launch Alliance, a competitor to SpaceX for commercial and national security launches, tweeted "Congratulations" to the company on Twitter, and its president, Gwynne Shotwell (but, notably, not directly to Musk). Bruno's company retweeted the message. But there were no other calls of support from other major aerospace firms, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Orbital ATK, Aerojet Rocketdyne, and others.

During the news conference Martin Halliwell, the chief technical officer for SES, offered a plausible explanation for what other companies that have not avidly pursued reusability might have been thinking at the time. The rest of the launch industry, he said, is shaking in its boots. "I think it's shaking now," he said. "I really do." Soon, he said, it will become the industry norm to fly used rockets—that flying anything but a new rocket will have lost its present stigma. "My belief is that within 24 months it will be irrelevant whether a rocket has been pre-flown, or not. That's what this means today."

Future plans

SpaceX hasn't been entirely open about how much work went into refurbishing the Falcon 9 rocket launched Thursday, which had previously flown to space in April 2016. But Musk said the company is finding that turning boosters around isn't too difficult, and from what it has learned in recent months, this is all doable.

Still, there are some lessons to be learned from the first stages recovered so far. The Falcon 9's base heat shield needs some work, and the stabilizing "grid fins" have caught fire due to atmospheric heating. To address this problem the company is forging new grid fins from titanium, which can tolerate heating better than the present aluminum-with-thermal-protection fins. The paint also burns off. "There are a bunch of little things, really," Musk said.

He believes the company has a clear path to his goal for the Falcon 9 rocket, however, a 24-hour turnaround from launch to landing to launch, with no maintenance. He believes the final version of the Falcon 9 optimized for reuse, set to fly late this year or early in 2018, will be capable of 10 flights "with no refurbishment," and 100 flights with "moderate refurbishment." 24-hour turnarounds should come by next year.

That would be remarkable. And Elon Musk certainly is prone to overpromising in terms of delivery dates. But on Thursday night it was hard to doubt the immigrant from South Africa who had taken on the bluebloods of the global aerospace industry with a vision of low-cost reusable rockets—and had just validated that entire plan before the world. "If SpaceX and others can do this, it means that humanity can become a spacefaring civilization, and be out there among the stars. This is what we want for the future."

Such a dream seemed almost tangible on Thursday night.

Listing image by SpaceX