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Elon Musk’s spaceship with legs rescheduled to launch on Friday

Fingers crossed that it’s a good Friday (badoom) for South African-born inventor Elon Musk. His firm SpaceX has confirmed that its third mission to the International Space Station – which has been delayed since early March – is due to blast off on April 18th following the cancellation of yesterday’s launch due to a helium leak.

This particular flight is especially important for SpaceX. The firm, which also announced last night that it has taken a 20-year lease on a launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is using it as an opportunity to test its landing legs that it hopes will make future rockets reusable and cut the cost of space travel by a factor of 100.

This week’s mission, CRS-3, will see a Falcon-9 rocket blast one of the company’s Dragon capsules up towards the space station. Instead of falling away and burning up when it’s fuel is spent, however, the main rocket will attempt to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere. Once it begins re-entry, four landing legs will deploy and SpaceX will attempt to bring it back to Earth’s surface in one piece.

The firm isn’t expecting to succeed fully, however, and says that the chances of success are around 30-40%. What’s important, however, is the data that will be gathered ready for future tests.

To date, the highest altitude from which the company has managed to recover a ‘Grasshopper’ system – the prototype for the legs attached to the Falcon rocket – is 744m. You can see that experiment – conducted in October last year – below.

[Image – SpaceX, Hattip  – New Scientist]

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