SpaceX launches futuristic pop-up room, lands rocket at sea

This time, they did it.

After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football-field-size floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled off the feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year.

The landing, the first of a rocket’s first stage at sea, was heralded as yet another milestone for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry and its leader, SpaceX.

“It’s another step toward the stars. In order for us to really open up access to space, we have to have full and rapid reusability,” Musk said at a news conference afterward.

In December, SpaceX landed the first stage of its unmanned Falcon 9 rocket on a landing pad it built at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. And Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, has now launched and landed the first stage of its suborbital New Shepard vehicle three times. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

The companies’ efforts to recover their rockets are part of what Bezos calls the “Holy Grail” quest of lowering the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments.

Typically, the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a second stage, or a capsule, to space.

SpaceX broadcast the launch and landing live on its website, where some 80,000 viewers watched the booster descend toward the platform. The first stage was hurtling toward space when it started doing a bit of aerial acrobatics, turning itself around and heading back toward Earth.

As it approached the platform, the booster was tilted into the wind but was able to right itself just before touching down, about nine minutes after liftoff.

“It’s quite a tiny target. It’s like trying to land on a postage stamp there,” Musk said. “It’s like a carrier landing versus a land landing.”

At SpaceX’s headquarters, just outside Los Angeles, employees broke out in raucous applause as congratulations poured in from across the country.

Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield and Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, tweeted their well-wishes. “Opens the imagination to what is possible,” Hadfield wrote. President Barack Obama also tweeted: “Congrats SpaceX on landing a rocket at sea. It’s because of innovators like you & NASA that America continues to lead in space explorations.”

Musk’s ultimate goal is to colonize Mars, and his company has been gaining experience launching rockets under the lucrative NASA contracts it holds to fly cargo to the space station. Along with Boeing, SpaceX also won a NASA contract to fly astronauts there by 2017, which would mark the first manned flights from U.S. soil since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.

In its previous attempts to land on what SpaceX calls an “autonomous spaceport drone ship,” the rockets hit the platforms. But each time, they either crashed hard or fell over and exploded. Musk said the company would test-fire the returned rocket 10 times. If those firings go well, the company would launch the rocket on an orbital mission, perhaps as early as June.

Friday’s successful launch at 4:43 p.m. was the company’s first mission to the space station since last June, when its unmanned rocket blew up a few minutes into flight. Since that catastrophic failure, SpaceX has flown three times, launching commercial and government satellites into orbit.

SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft is expected to rendezvous with the station Sunday morning. The spacecraft is filled with about 7,000 pounds of supplies and science experiments, including an expandable habitat.

The habitat has been developed by another commercial space company, Bigelow Aerospace, founded by Robert Bigelow, a wealthy entrepreneur who started Budget Suites of America.

The habitat is packed in the trunk of the spacecraft and would ultimately be inflated once it is attached to the space station. Made of a material similar to Kevlar, it is to be periodically visited by the astronauts on board the station, who would test to see how it fares in space’s harsh environment.

The habitat is expected to stay affixed to the station for two years. But ultimately, the company plans to fly its B330 habitats, which are 20 times as big and could be used as lunar bases one day.

This story was originally published April 8, 2016 at 8:44 PM with the headline "SpaceX launches futuristic pop-up room, lands rocket at sea."