Good to see the boy from Pretoria's company doing so well! Interesting also to see how the buzz cuts and formal attire of the commentators of 60's and 70's has given way to the less formal attire of the Californian space dude in some of the footage associated with this launch. Tempus fugit.
VANDENBERG AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. — SpaceX launched 10 satellites to orbit today (Jan. 14) in a rousing return-to-flight mission that also included a rocket landing on a ship at sea.
SpaceX's two-stage Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from a launch pad just a few hundred meters from the scenic California coastline here today at 12:54 p.m. EST (1754 GMT; 9:54 a.m. local California time), carrying 10 communications satellites to low-Earth orbit for the Virginia-based company Iridium. After a week of heavy rain and strong winds, only a few clouds obscured the view of the rocket as it climbed skyward.
Deployment of the satellites began 59 minutes after liftoff and took about 15 minutes, SpaceX representatives said.
This success was critically important to SpaceX, which is bouncing back from a Sept. 1 launch pad explosion that destroyed a Falcon 9 and its payload, the $200 million Amos-6 communications satellite. The company had been grounded until today, as it investigated the accident and worked to ensure that something similar doesn't happen again.
Rocket landing, too
Not all of today's action was in the skyward direction. A few minutes after launch, the Falcon 9's first stage separated from the upper stage, then headed back down to Earth to attempt a touchdown on "Just Read the Instructions," one of SpaceX's two robotic "drone ships," which was stationed in the Pacific Ocean off the California coast.
The rocket stuck the landing eight minutes after lifting off. SpaceX has now pulled off seven such touchdowns during orbital launches, with five coming on drone ships and two rockets flying back to their launch sites on terra firma. (The previous six landings all occurred after launches from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, between December 2015 and August 2016.)
These rocket touchdowns are part of SpaceX's effort to develop fully and rapidly reusable launch vehicles, a key priority for SpaceX's billionaire founder and CEO, Elon Musk. Such technology could cut the cost of launches dramatically, potentially enabling much greater access to space, Musk has said.
http://www.space.com/35338-spacex-retur ... ccess.html
[bbvideo=560,315]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7RcGfxsIbE[/bbvideo]
Caco