Today is a big day for Spacex. By 9:43 PM Nigerian time, today, SpaceX will carry out a critical launch of its rocket. The launch which is scheduled to take place at Cape Canaveral, Fla, United States, will be SpaceX eighth attempt at going to space and landing the Falcon 9 rocket successfully.
As to what Falcon 9 will be carrying, Bloomberg reported that the “SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule will carry 7,000 pounds of supplies, science experiments, and technology demonstrations to the orbiting lab, according to NASA. The launch marks SpaceX’s first mission to the ISS since last June, when Falcon 9 blew apart 139 seconds after launch. An initial investigation into that mishap pointed to a two-foot-long, inch-thick strut in a liquid oxygen tank that snapped.”
SpaceX has invested heavily in space transportation and logistics. This time and around, the company has all at stake. The company has attached a camera to the platform where the reusable rocket will land. If the webcast is scrambled, it means SpaceX has failed again.
The company was successful in landing the rocket on the ground but that is not its goal. The goal is to land it on a drone ship away floating on the Atlantic Ocean. The launch and landing today will be a decider for the company.
Elon Musk, the current CEO of Tesla [NASDAQ: TSLA], founded SpaceX in 2002 with the ‘goal of creating the technologies to reduce space transportation costs and enable the colonization of Mars’.
SpaceX has been funded by a combination of American government’s support, $200 million in investors’ capital and about $100 million from Musk himself. SpaceX projects have gulped at least $1 billion in total expenditure.
