Let’s give it up for Hawthorne-based space aeronautics company SpaceX! This week they became the first commercial company to successfully reenter a spacecraft back towards Earth from space.
That’s right, bitches. SoCal not only has perfect weather and famous celebrities, we can also send stuff into space and back!
The Falcon 9 Dragon launch happened Wednesday morning at 7:43am PST from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It took about 10 minutes to reach low level orbit and eventually circled the globe twice before splashing back down in the Pacific Ocean at 11:02am PST.
According to the LA Times, only 5 countries (including the U.S.) and the European Space Agency have succeded in doing what SpaceX did:
If all goes as planned, the Dragon will be the nation’s first new human-capable spacecraft to orbit the Earth and return since the space shuttle first started flying nearly 30 years ago. It also would mark the first time that a space capsule would splash down in the ocean since the last Apollo mission in 1975.
SpaceX’s CEO, Elon Musk, was absolutely ecstatic over the launch:
“The flight has really been better than I expected. It’s actually almost too good. There’s so much that can go wrong and it all went right. I’m sort of in semi-shock.”
Why wouldn’t he be? Less than a decade ago he sold PayPal for a boatload of money, and now he’s breaking ground in the space flight industry. The successful mission is bound to encourage NASA to award SpaceX with even more lucrative contracts for future space cargo needs. NASA had invested $200 million in the company along with a $1.6 billion contract for the Dragon to ferry cargo to Space Station next year.
