Launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, the rocket initiated by an entrepreneur from the Web had a successful inaugural flight.
Unexpected: at blastoff, an insect flying past the camera shooting the Falcon 9’s takeoff for a live web broadcast looks bigger than the rocket! Credit: SpaceX
This rocket is what everyone in the space world is talking about, especially since the new NASA budget was announced by the White House, which plans to arrange for the private sector to organise cargo flights to the International Space Station, then manned flights. This rocket is the Falcon 9 that successfully reached orbit after 9 minutes and 38 seconds on its maiden test flight. Takeoff was at 14:45 local time in Florida and SpaceX confirmed shortly afterward that the mission had accomplished all its goals, the second stage and its Dragon qualification capsule having reached orbit at an altitude of approximately 250km. Both of them, which were not designed to separate during this test flight, will then re-enter the upper layers of the atmosphere where they will burn up. Watch the video of the launch below filmed by NASA.
The stakes involved in this flight were so high that Elon Musk, Web tycoon and founder of SpaceX, preferred to declare beforehand that a partial success would be an advance in itself. Indeed, many observers saw this flight as a true test of President Barack Obama’s policy; failure would probably have been taken as an omen that small private companies could not support the new approach the White House wishes to take.
During his visit to the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on 15 April 2010, President Barack Obama (left) went to the SLC-40 launch pad for the Falcon 9 (visible in the background) at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station nearby. On this occasion, he spoke with SpaceX founder Elon Musk (right). Credit: NASA/Bill Ingalls
Of course, SpaceX is not actually a small company housed in a garage. Since 2002, the entrepreneur who developed secure PayPal payment on the Internet (then sold it to eBay) has built an aerospace company with over 1,000 employees under contract to NASA. After this successful first flight, SpaceX must complete three more missions to demonstrate that its automatic Dragon capsule (placed at the tip of the Falcon 9) can safely service the International Space Station. If these flights are successful, NASA will sign with the young company a contract for 12 flights amounting to 1.6 billion US dollars. In the longer term, the launch of a manned Dragon flight is being considered and, in this respect, we can note that the vice president in charge of the crews’ safety and security is none other than the former NASA astronaut Ken Bowersox!
This is the mythical rocket par excellence, the one that launched Sputnik, the first satellite and Gagarin, the first man in space. The CSG, Guiana Space Centre, is now one of its launch bases: a historic achievement.
The first episode of this famous science-fiction series was broadcast in September 1966. NASA has often made references to these programmes, as in the case of the space shuttle Enterprise, which had the same name as the spaceship in the series.
50 years ago on 5 May 1961, a few weeks after Gagarin, American Alan Shepard reached space. Several years later, he was to walk on the Moon, summarising as it were the race in which the Soviet Union and the United States were competing.
