Today will be the second attempt of SpaceX to land the first stage of his latest rocket on a barge. If it succeeds it will be a milestone in human evolution and the next big step for colonizing space. If it fails then history will be made later this year. The launch is scheduled for 6:10pm Eastern – 3:10pm Pacific. 9 minutes after launch will be the first stage landing.

UPDATE: Launch scrubbed again due to high winds.

Next attempt will be 6:03PM (3:03 Pacific) on Wednesday 02-11-2015.

For those who haven’t been following this closely SpaceX has landed test booster stages on land. Here’s a video of what a rocket landing looks like that isn’t science fiction.

Next is a real flight test where the first stage, just after a real launching returns to make a “soft” landing. but the landing is in the ocean where it immediately falls over as planned.

The next attempt is to bring it to the next level and land on a floating robotic drone barge in the ocean. This attempt was very close to succeeding but ran out of hydraulic fluid that controls the hypersonic grid fins. This is actually more success than failure because landing on a tiny barge in a big ocean is very difficult. So it was more significant that it hit the barge and exploded than if it had missed the barge and landed softly.

Elon call it a RUD (Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly)

Today we can assure you that it will not fail because of running out of hydraulic fluid. There is still a high risk of failure for other unknown reasons.

This is also the first mission for SpaceX to launch a craft beyond Earth orbit. Most SpaceX mission have been just 250 miles up to the International Space Station (ISS). Some have been a few thousand miles for a high orbit satellite. This mission is delivering a heavy satellite (Deep Space Climate Observatory)  to a position 1 million miles from Earth. So there’s not as much fuel left to land as there is on other missions. This landing is a little trickier than the last one. So success will be a little sweeter and failure a little more excusable.

Win or lose progress will be made and SpaceX will keep trying until they succeed. Eventually the rocket will fly back to the launch pad and land there. But for safety reasons the barge is the first step.

Reusable rockets will greatly reduce the cost of access to space. The first stage is 70% of the cost of the rocket. Getting the first stage back is like getting 2/3rds of your cost in a rebate. Kind of like returning a Coke bottle for a refund. If they get the whole rocket back (which is the plan eventually) the cost of going to space is 100 times cheaper.

The entire human race is rooting for you. Go Elon! On to MARS!



  1. J. Alfred Prufrock says:

    A milestone in rocket technology evolution?—Certainly. A milestone in [human] evolution?—Most dubious.

  2. Ah_Yea says:

    Short answer?

    No. Another small step.

    That’s ok, we progress through small steps.

  3. Flabbergasted says:

    WOW! Imagine that. An actual tech story on Dvorak’s web site. I’m not sure what’s the bigger story here; Elon Musk landing rockets like Buck Rogers, or Dvorak commenting on high tech (again).

  4. MikeN says:

    Isn’t Richard Branson way ahead of him?

  5. Spaghetti Code says:

    One line of bad code can cause million dollar mistakes.

  6. NewFormatSux says:

    Update, the rocket was abandoned. They didn’t even try.


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