UPDATE: As I mentioned as a possibility below, a problem with the vehicle has caused the launch attempt to be scrubbed, with Friday the next opportunity. The next attempt will be at 5:09 AM EST.
Tuesday, SpaceX is going to launch a supply mission to the International Space Station using their
Dragon capsule on top of a
Falcon 9 booster. The launch is set for 6:20 a.m. from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40. Best wishes for the main mission of course, but a secondary goal is potentially the real highlight of the launch:
SpaceX will attempt to steer the Falcon 9 first stage back to earth after it separates from the second stage, for a soft landing on a special barge waiting out in the Atlantic.
A CBS News report has some of the critical details (and photos of the barge landing pad.) Via CBS reporter William Harwood:
"For the upcoming launch, I think we've got a chance of landing on a floating landing platform," Musk said at MIT. "We actually have a huge platform that's being constructed at a shipyard in Louisiana right now, which is, well, it's huge, or huge-ish, I mean it's about 300 feet long by 170 feet wide. That looks very tiny from space. The leg-span of the rocket is (70) feet. And this is going to be positioning itself out in the ocean with engines that'll try to keep it in a particular position."
The barge will not be anchored and Musk said the sea state and navigation satellite errors will make landing a "tricky" operation. Even so, "we're going to try to land on that on the next flight."
"And if we land on that, I think we'll be able to refly that booster," he said. "But it's probably, maybe not more than a 50 percent chance, or less, of landing it on the platform for the first time. But there are ... at least a dozen launches that will occur over the next year, and I think it's quite likely, probably 80-to-90 percent likely, that one of those flights will be able to land and refly. So I think we're quite close."
emphasis added
The potential savings are significant:
"Look at something like Falcon 9, which cost about $60 million," he said. "The cost of the fuel and oxygen and so forth is only about $200,000. So that's a massive difference. If we could have full and rapid reusability, you could have that rocket flight that cost $60 million maybe cost only half a million, or even less."
Kenneth Chang at the New York Times has an article as well, including a picture showing the new "grid fins" that will help steer the booster as it re-enters the atmosphere on it's way to land on the barge.The Falcon itself has been modified, with larger fuel tanks so that it will have enough fuel to not only launch the upper stage to orbit, but enough to power its engines to brake down from space to a soft landing as well.
Supply missions to the International Space Station are routine - unmanned cargo rockets have been bringing up supplies for years, as have the crewed flights bringing up new astronauts. With the grounding of the Space Shuttle fleet however, payloads have been limited, and the only way to return anything to the ground has been in the limited space of the Soyuz capsules. The SpaceX Dragon capsule is currently the only supply capsule that can also return payloads to earth. From the NY Times:
This NASA cargo mission, SpaceX’s fifth, is carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and equipment, including an IMAX movie camera, a laboratory habitat for studying fruit flies, and an instrument to measure the distribution of clouds as well as particles of dust, smoke and air pollution. After four weeks docked to the space station, the SpaceX cargo capsule will carry experiments, trash and other items back to Earth.
While it will take some time for the Dragon capsule to reach the International Space Station, the attempt to land the Falcon 9 will come within minutes of the planned 6:20 AM launch (EST). If the initial attempt succeeds, it will be watershed moment in space flight. So far, weather forecasts are favorable for the launch; the only potential showstoppers are last-minute glitches with the vehicle and other things of that nature (fingers crossed). If for some reason the launch is canceled, the next attempt might come as early as Friday. The launch window is limited because of the need to match orbits with the Space Station - it'll either launch or it won't.
NASA will be covering the launch live on the Internet; links here.
Here's a video of one of the test vehicles used to develop the landing systems - picture something like that trying to come down on a barge bobbing up and down in the ocean!
http://youtu.be/...