Electric car maker Elon Musk’s Rocket Company will soon take another giants step towards ensuring that space flight becomes cheaper.
The company Space Exploration Technologies Corp will today double down on the concept of recycling spacecraft which the company has previously flown to space and landed back on the planet. In a mission sanctioned by NASA, SpaceX has announced that it is going to reuse both its rockets and capsules that was previously fired off.
This will make space emissions work similar to commercial airline flights and will reduce the cost dramatically. The move will result in less money wasted discarding rockets and spacecraft after single launches. The success of SpaceX in this regard has propelled it to one of the world’s most richly valued private companies. The company has also attracted customers such as NASA, who have received directions by President Donald Trump to return to the moon and explore planet Mars using the help of private companies.
Ernie Chung, an aerospace, defence and airline consultant at AlixPartners LLP while commenting on the latest development stated that “At this point, the notion of reuse of hardware is almost unremarkable. What is remarkable is that SpaceX appears to be continuing to lead the march down the cost curve for space access.”
Earlier on Monday, President Donald Trump ordered a space order that doesn’t differ much from the memo of former president Barack Obama back in 2010. He altered only a paragraph from the original memo where Barack Obama had called for NASA to send humans to an asteroid by 2025 and to orbit Mars by the mid-2030s. Trump did away with the asteroid mission and replaced it with a return to the moon, though the directive doesn’t include a timeframe for going to the moon or exploring Mars.
There weren’t many details from The White House regarding how NASA’s expedition to the moon or Mars is going to be funded. Two companies SpaceX and Boeing Co have been awarded contracts worth billions that would see them send American astronauts to the International Space Station. The first key tests of the technology developed would be done by 2018.
