Perhaps feeling a bit put out that Blue Origin stole its re-usable rocket thunder, commercial spaceflight company SpaceX has apparently decided to forget about the whole landing a rocket on an ocean drone thing. Instead, for its next attempt to bring a Falcon 9 booster safely back to Earth, SpaceX is going whole hog: Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.
That’s according to NASA representatives, who confirmed that SpaceX will try to land a rocket on solid ground while speaking with the media at Kennedy Space Center’s 39A pad, Florida Today reports. SpaceX is in the process of preparing the pad for launches of Falcon 9 rockets, and eventually, NASA astronauts. (Cape Canaveral’s historic launchpads are getting a bit crowded with commercial enterprise these days; Blue Origin just took over Launch Complex 36 earlier this year).
“Their plan is to try to land (the next booster) out here on the Cape-side,” said Carol Scott of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
The announcement comes days after Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s rocket company, successfully landed its New Shepard booster in Texas after making it to low Earth orbit — a first in the history of spaceflight. The accomplishment, which came pretty much out of nowhere, was met with a congratulatory tweet from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, followed by a few qualifying statements explaining why it wasn’t really all that impressive compared with what his company is trying to achieve:
Congrats to Jeff Bezos and the BO team for achieving VTOL on their booster
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2015
Getting to space needs ~Mach 3, but GTO orbit requires ~Mach 30. The energy needed is the square, i.e. 9 units for space and 900 for orbit.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2015
SpaceX, for its part, has been trying (and failing) to land its Falcon 9 rockets on ocean barges for over a year now. The rocket company accomplished a “soft ocean landing” last year, but in subsequent attempts to set Falcon 9 boosters down on platforms, the rockets came in too hard or without enough control. SpaceX’s most recent Falcon 9 launch in June blew up on its way to orbit — the first mission failure in the company’s history.
While one might wonder if it isn’t a bit premature for SpaceX to be attempting to land rockets around infrastructure and people, when it hasn’t yet been able to do so in the middle of the ocean, Florida Today reports that the company believes it will have more success landing on solid turf versus a shaky ocean barge. Who knows, maybe SpaceX was just the teensiest bit motivated by Blue Origin’s recent achievement.
At any rate, we don’t yet know when this brave landing will take place — first, it has to be approved as part of a still-pending FAA commercial launch licence. Later this month, SpaceX is expected to launch a constellation of small communications satellites into orbit.
But if one thing’s becoming clearer every day, it’s that the space race is making a big comeback.
Top image: Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral is the future home for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 missions. Image Credit: SpaceX / Flickr