SpaceX is having one hugely eventful day.
Over the course of just 12 hours, the company plans to guide a Dragon spaceship home from the International Space Station, then launched a communications satellite on one of its Falcon 9 rockets.
Half the job is already done. In the early hours of Monday morning, SpaceX’s Dragon undocked from the space station. It then fired up its engines so it could safely de-orbit and cut back through the earth’s atmosphere before deploying parachutes and landing in the ocean just after 8 a.m. ET.
That completed SpaceX’s 11th unmanned resupply mission to the space station — and the company’s very first with a used Dragon spacecraft.
Yep, the Dragon capsule that landed in the ocean Monday morning had done it all once before.
It was first flown to the space station in a September 2014 mission before SpaceX brought it home, refurbished it and sent it off to the space station again on June 3. It stayed for a month, while the crew conducted some experiments that Dragon brought along, and it was loaded with lab results and other items before it was sent home Monday.
Reusing stuff it sends to space is a major part of SpaceX’s business plan. It’s a big reason why the company has been so influential in the commercial space industry. The idea is to drastically reduce the price of spaceflight by creating hardware — rocket boosters, spacecrafts, etc. — that can be used more than once.
But SpaceX didn’t have that long to celebrate its Dragon reflight success.
The company is scheduled to launch a rocket from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Monday evening. The plan is to send a hefty satellite to geostationary orbit for Intelsat.
The launch was originally scheduled for Sunday night, but it was halted with just nine seconds left on the countdown. SpaceX later said it was a computer-made decision, but it’s not yet clear what the issue was.
SpaceX’s Monday evening launch was first slated for 7:37 p.m. ET, but its since been pushed back slightly to 8:07 p.m. ET.
The company won’t attempt its signature move: guiding the first-stage rocket booster back to Earth so it can be used again in the future. The Intelsat satellite on board is extremely heavy, so Falcon 9 will have to go full throttle to generate enough upward thrust. That meant there won’t be enough fuel left to guide the Falcon home.
SpaceX can’t reuse everything. Yet.