Elon Musk's SpaceX is about to land its 50th Falcon 9 booster
The effort to return booster rockets to Earth had been tried and had failed several times; it turns out landing a rocket back on Earth safely is pretty difficult. So Elon Musk was not deluding himself in 2014 when he calculated the odds that his company, SpaceX, would eventually get it right: “not great — perhaps 50 percent, at best.”
And then they did. Just before Christmas 2015, a Falcon 9 booster became the first rocket to deliver a payload to orbit, reorient itself, fly back through the atmosphere, find its landing spot — in that case, a pad on the coast at Cape Canaveral — and touch down softly.
Since then, SpaceX has done it again and again, so many times that Musk has achieved his goal, normalizing a feat once thought impossible. Now SpaceX is on the verge of its 50th landing in a launch now scheduled for Sunday, a milestone celebrated within the company and the larger space industry, which has come to agree that ditching rocket boosters into the ocean — the practice for decades — is an expensive waste of a perfectly good vehicle.
“We got there much faster than I ever thought we would,” said Garrett Reisman, a former NASA astronaut who worked at SpaceX for years and now serves as a consultant. “Just over four years — that is really remarkable, the fact that it has become routine in four years. It’s still not routine to me. I get excited. I still get goose bumps.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/02/14/elon-musks-spacex-is-about-land-its-50th-falcon-9-booster/
It looks like they didn't recover the first stage this morning, but I'm sure they'll have the data to improve future performance; I suspect something may have gone wrong on the initial re-entry burn when they lost real-time video. Nevertheless, 49 successful recaptures of the first stage is impressive. Waiting to hear if they recovered the fairings.
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