SpaceX Will Attempt to Land a Rocket on a Drone Boat Friday

For every space launch in history, the rocket being used first ignites, travels for a bit with the satellite (or spaceship, or whatever), then separates and crash lands somewhere. Its carcass is useless, broken, and expensive. Friday, for the first time in human history, a space company will try to recover its rocket so that it can be flown again.

SpaceX will try to recover part of its Falcon 9 rocket by landing the first stage of it (most rockets have separate stages, which each contain engines and propellant—the Falcon 9 has two) on a 300 by 100-foot autonomous drone ship. If it's successful, it'll be a huge step toward CEO Elon Musk's goal of reducing the cost of human spaceflight "by a factor of 100."

Rockets are really damn expensive. The Falcon 9 costs upward of $35 million to manufacture. Refueling the first stage costs a couple hundred thousand. And that's after you've got a design. Starting from scratch with research, development, and testing costs, well, many, many millions more.

Reusable rockets have so far been a pipe dream for years. The closest we've actually come has been Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne and SpaceShipTwo. Both have been nice steps forward, this fall's accident notwithstanding, but aren't exactly "rockets" per se. Instead, those ships are spaceplanes, which are only capable of carrying a couple people to suborbital space. The Falcon 9, meanwhile, can and does go to orbital space, and can carry many orders of magnitude more cargo there.

Reusability has been the main goal of SpaceX since it was started; at a press conference in 2010, Musk said that it is the measuring stick he's using for the company's success.

"Reusability is one of the most important goals," he said. "If we become the biggest launch company in the world, making money hand over fist, but we're still not reusable, I will consider us to have failed."

Becoming the biggest launch company in the world hinges on becoming reusable, however. Musk thinks he can get orbital launch prices down to $1 million if the Falcon 9 and future rockets can become truly reusable, which is quite a discount on the $100+ million price tag it takes to, say, send something to the International Space Station.

It's easy to talk about making reusable rockets, but it hasn't happened yet for a reason. Take the Falcon 9: After it separates from its payload, the 14-story-tall rocket plunges back toward Earth at a speed of more than a mile per second. It's aiming for a (relatively) tiny platform sitting in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And this is where its thrusters come into play.

"To help stabilize the stage and to reduce its speed, SpaceX relights the engines for a series of three burns," the company wrote in a blog post. "The first burn—the boostback burn—adjusts the impact point of the vehicle and is followed by the supersonic retro propulsion burn that, along with the drag of the atmosphere, slows the vehicle's speed from 1300 meters per second to about 250 m/s. The final burn is the landing burn, during which the legs deploy and the vehicle's speed is further reduced to around 2 m/s."

The reentry burns are combined with new, steerable fins that will help guide the rocket as it returns to Earth. In previous tests, the rocket has been able to land upright in the ocean, but the target was a huge 10-kilometer zone. For Friday's attempt, the company is "targeting a landing accuracy of within 10 meters."

Here's what the boat has to catch.

It's going to try to land on an unanchored, untethered drone boat designed specifically for the task, and, as you can imagine, the boat itself will have quite a task holding onto the rocket when it tries to land.

"While the ship is equipped with powerful thrusters to help it stay in place, it is not actually anchored, so finding the bullseye becomes particularly tricky," the company wrote.

So, yeah, it's a tough task. The company admits that "the odds of success are not great—perhaps 50 percent at best."

But this is the future. Landing in the middle of the ocean is a safe way of testing out the technology, but the plan is to eventually return SpaceX rockets to land-based launch sites. Within the next year or so, we may have the world's first fully reusable rocket.

"Over the next year, SpaceX has at least a dozen launches planned with a number of additional testing opportunities," the company wrote. "Given what we know today, we believe it is quite likely that with one of those flights we will not only be able to land a Falcon 9 first stage, but also re-fly."