SpaceX成功回收火箭 或将颠覆航天业

choi

Andy Pasztor, SpaceX成功回收火箭 或将颠覆航天业. 华尔街日报中文版, Dec 22, 2015
cn.wsj.com/gb/20151222/biz180645.asp

, which is translated from

Andy Pasztor, SpaceX Launch Puts It Back in Air; SpaceX put out a simple tweet that said it all: 'Stage one has landed.' Wall Street Journal, Dec 22, 2015.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hist ... industry-1450750793

Quote:

(a) "After a trouble-free countdown and liftoff of the roughly 230-foot-tall booster from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, SpaceX delivered 11 commercial satellites into low-earth orbit, completing Orbcomm Inc.’s planned constellation.

"But the most daunting—and closely watched—portion of the mission occurred more than eight minutes after blastoff, once the spent first stage plummeted toward earth, used its thrusters to steadily slow and then touched down vertically—surrounded by a huge plume of exhaust—on a landing area in the same iconic space complex.

"The gentle landing, after several failed attempts to return an identical section of the booster to a barge, marked the first time any large rocket has managed a controlled recovery after delivering a payload into orbit.

(b) "The space company backed by Amazon.com Inc’s founder and chairman Jeff Bezos, another billionaire with huge space ambitions, last month deprived SpaceX of an undisputed claim to the historic achievement of landing a spent rocket back on earth. * * * Traveling back from a suborbital trip to the edge of space—a lower altitude than the one Falcon 9 reached Monday—Blue Origin’s rocket safely landed in West Texas ready for another flight.

My comment:
(a) The print version ends at the end of quotation (b). (The online version goes on a bit longer.)
(b) There is no need to read the rest. Quotations explains the difference in flights between SpaceX and Blue Origin.
(c) video clip:
(i) SpaceX's website has a full-length webcast (lasting almost fifty minutes).
SpaceX rocket in historic upright landing. YOuTube.com, uploaded by BBC News on Dec 22, 2015.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSmNid9L4fo

* There is no close-up, at least so far (Blue Origin had, from various angles). And it is in the evening, so one can not see much.