Posted on 10/05/2018 7:09:40 AM PDT by BenLurkin
SpaceX has made history by having the first stages of its Falcon 9 rockets conduct controlled landings. One of the side effects of those landings has been triple sonic booms – something the U.S. Air Force noted in a statement issued on Tuesday.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with the SAOCOM 1A and ITASAT 1 satellites are scheduled to launch from Space Launch Complex-4E on Sunday, Oct. 7, at 7:21 p.m. PDT, a 24 hour slip from the previous launch date. SpaceX noted the change in the schedule in a Twitter post which stated the following:
Now targeting October 7 for launch of SAOCOM 1A. Rocket and payload are healthy; additional time will be used to complete pre-flight vehicle checkouts.
To date, SpaceX stands alone as the only commercial company to deliver payloads to orbit and then recover and reuse part of the rocket for use on later missions. This has allowed the Hawthorne, California-based company to significantly reduce launch costs.
To date SpaceX has carried out 29 successful landings of Falcon 9 first stages. This re-usability is part of the company’s philosophy with the cargo variant of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft also reused and re-flown.
(Excerpt) Read more at spaceflightinsider.com ...
To date, SpaceX stands alone as the only commercial company to deliver payloads to orbit and then recover and reuse part of the rocket for use on later missions. This has allowed the Hawthorne, California-based company to significantly reduce launch costs.
...
Even without that capability they were still the lowest cost launcher.
I remember a lot of sonic booms when I was a little kid in Southern California.
I remember lots of them when I was a little kid in Petersburg, Virginia. About 150 miles SW of Washington.
Cool...Haven’t heard sonic booms for about 50 years since we lived south of Seattle.
From reading Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, I was expecting to be hearing nothing BUT sonic booms by now.
I remember during the Shuttle days when ‘RTLS’ (Return To Launch Site) was a bad thing.
It meant that things had screwed up royally and they were going to try to return to the Cape. But there was a lot of debate on whether or not it would actually work.
John Young, commander of STS-1, said that “RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful.”
In other words, everything, i.e., waiting for the SRB’s to burn out, separating the almost-full ET, dumping orbiter excess fuel so it doesn’t just fall out of the sky, etc. has to work perfectly after everything else has gone horribly wrong.
Yeah, right!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.