It was a big weekend for Space X which has successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket not once but twice over the course of the last three days.
On Friday 23rd June Space X launched the BulgariaSat-1 mission which launched Bulgaria’s first geostationary communications satellite from the Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.
“Following stage separation, the first stage of Falcon 9 successfully landed on SpaceX’s East Coast droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You,’ stationed in the Atlantic Ocean,” Space X said in a statement. You can check out the full webcast including launch and landing below.
Despite Elon Musk’s doubts that the rocket booster would not make it back to Earth in one piece thanks to the force it would experience, Musk tweeted later that the rocket had survived.
Rocket is extra toasty and hit the deck hard (used almost all of the emergency crush core), but otherwise good
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 23, 2017
Then on Sunday SpaceX launched Falcon 9 again, this time with 10 low-Earth orbit satellites for the communications company Iridium.
This time the rocket landed on the droneship ‘Just Read The Instructions’ despite what the firm called “challenging weather conditions”.
If you can’t watch those two streams of SpaceX’s triumph’s not to worry. Musk posted footage of Falcon 9’s descent to Instagram.
Sped up version of today’s rocket landing on the Droneship Just Read the Instructions (guess it did)
A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on
[Image – CC 0 Public Domain SpaceX]