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Falcon 9's second morning at Port Canaveral
This 50 metre-tall booster returned from space last Friday, having sent a Dragon cargo ship packed with supplies, mice, and a new advanced type of compact inflatable room up to the International Space Station.
Under its own power, it took just ten minutes to reach the Automated Spaceport Drone Ship landing platform waiting for it 500km offshore, but it took four days to return on that ship to Florida, arriving in the pre-dawn hours of Tuesday.
Basking in the golden glow of the Florida sunrise, Falcon 9's soot-daubed first stage towers over its surroundings, but looks strangely at home among the gigantic cranes of the harbour. It awaits the arrival of SpaceX workers who will remove the legs to allow it to be trucked back to Kennedy Space Centre for check-out and cleaning, followed by extensive test firing.
If all goes well, this particular rocket will fly another payload to space in a few month's time, likely a satellite from the SES corporation. There will be a discount for flying on a reused stage, ushering in a new era of cheaper reusable rockets.
After all, if planes were thrown away after every flight (as nearly all rockets are, currently), the passengers on that flight would have to pay for the total cost of the plane, and air travel would be prohibitively expensive.
That's the state of the rocket industry today... But it's about to change. At some point in the future, a ticket to space might cost a couple of hundred bucks... and the possibilities of cheap space travel are endless.
Image is a screenshot of www.PortCanaveralWebcam.com - a site that has been incredibly supportive, informative, and valuable to the SpaceX fab community over the last 36 hours. Their Twitter handle is @PTZtv. We've been making sure they know how cool they are!