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By Andrew Follett
SpaceX successfully launched a communications satellite for a telecom giant into orbit with a reused rocket booster Thursday.
“My mind is blown,” Elon Musk, SpaceX’s billionaire CEO founder, told reporters.“This is one of the coolest things ever. We just had an incredible day today – the first re-flight of an orbital-class booster.”
Musk’s company expects that reusing rockets will eventually reduce its cost by 30 percent, to $42.8 million per rocket launch from today’s $61.2 million cost. Private space companies are scrambling to pioneer reusable rocket technology to make space flights cheaper; going into space is expensive because of the costly rocket components.
The company plans to have its 230-foot Falcon Heavy rocket fly around the moon as earlier as next year. It’s shorter than Bezos’ rocket but capable of lifting 60 tons into orbit, or 15 tons more than the Blue Origin rocket.
Despite SpaceX’s more short-term timeline in the moon race, Blue Origin beat Musk’s company in the race to successfully land the first reusable rocket after officially going to space in November 2015. The race was marked by both billionaires aggressively tweeting at one another to explain why their rocket design was better.
SpaceX is modifying its current Dragon capsules to carry astronauts into orbit. The capsule has already successfully flown uncrewed resupply missions to the International Space Station (ISS) for NASA. The company will send the first crewed trip to the ISS in mid-2018, according to Musk. Blue Origin plans to launch its first crewed test flight this year and start commercial crewed missions to suborbital space in 2018.
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