Posted on Thursday, October 25 2018 @ 11:53 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
SpaceX is about to perform another first for the space industry. The company made history by being the first in the world to land a rocket's first stage, and at the moment they've already re-used Falcon 9 rockets 16 times. However, the firm has never flown a single first stage more than twice. That's about to change as the company will soon launch a Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket for a third flight. This rocket launch may be scheduled for November 19:
"We've launched Falcon 9 over 60 times," [Lars] Hoffman [,senior director of government sales at SpaceX,] said at the Wernher von Braun Memorial Symposium on Wednesday afternoon. "We've landed our first stage booster 30 times now. And relaunched 16 times. We're about to relaunch a booster for the third time. So we're turning this into routine access to space. High-reliability, higher-performance, lower-cost access to space; that opens it up to everybody."
The company has not officially confirmed its plans, but at present SpaceX intends to reuse a Falcon 9 rocket for the third time to launch a rideshare mission of dozens of small satellites for Spaceflight. This Spaceflight SSO-A mission currently has a launch date of November 19, according to a calendar maintained by Spaceflight Now. An earlier report in The Space Review previously indicated this mission may involve the third flight of a booster.
More at
ARS Technica.
