Late last month a South African did something utterly amazing. It was not Jacob Zuma or any of the ANC leadership, though there was a Pretoria connection.
On March 30, space flight was forever changed when SpaceX (founded by Pretoria Boys High old boy Elon Musk) reused a Falcon9 rocket that had already made a trip to space.
The first phase of the Falcon9, which landed back on Earth on April 8 last year, was reused last month to launch a satellite. It then landed on a robot barge in the ocean.
Not only is it remarkable that booster rockets can be reused, but this will save vast amounts of money. A Falcon9 launch costs about US$62m now, with the first stage estimated to cost about 70% of that. Last month’s launch — of an SES-10 communications satellite — cost less than half the usual rate.
"[I] am fairly confident we can reuse [a rocket’s] upper stage too by late next year to get to 100% [reusability]," Musk tweeted. That leaves only the fuel bill of $200,000-$300,000.
It’s huge news. And it helps Musk towards realising his vision of humanity ultimately becoming "multiplanetary".
Space X — more formally, Space Exploration — was formed in 2002. It is part of Musk’s plan to get people to Mars. He is already offering tickets for $200,000, though he has warned potential astronauts they might die.
I heard him joke at the South by Southwest conference in 2013: "I’ve said I want to die on Mars. Just not on impact."
After the launch, Musk told reporters: "This represents the culmination of 15 years of work at SpaceX to be able to refly a rocket booster. The most expensive part of the whole mission, from a launch standpoint, is the boost stage."
SpaceX has designed its Falcon 9 rockets to be reusable. So far 32 have been launched, and nine have landed successfully from 14 attempts.
Musk says SpaceX is also trying to reuse the rocket’s tip, called the payload fairing. "At one point, we were debating whether we should try to recover it. Imagine you had $6m in cash in a pallet flying through the air, and it’s going to smash into the ocean. Would you try to recover it? Yes, you would," he says.
— Not only is it remarkable that booster rockets can be reused, but this will save vast amounts of money
Half of the fairing on this trip was recovered, prompting him to
say: "That’s definitely the cherry on the cake."
Another of Musk’s plans, which he announced last year, is to launch 4,425 satellites into space to create a network to provide global Internet coverage, though no date has been set for this.
The most poetic (and geeky) part of this reused Falcon rocket is the name of the drone ship on which it landed. Musk has a quirky way of naming these barges after the sentient spaceships in Iain M Banks’s Culture series of sci-fi novels. The name of last month’s ship: Of Course I Still Love You.
* Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine
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