Elon Musk was ecstatic when the Falcon rocket successfully landed.
Elon Musk is an engineer, investor, and inventor who is known for his interests in renewable energy and space travel. SpaceX is one of his most ambitious projects, and it successfully completed its first mission in 2015. On the one year anniversary of the SpaceX rocket success, National Geographic has released a video showing Musk’s reaction as he watched his spaceship make its historical landing.
New Footage Reveals Elon Musk’s Reaction to SpaceX Landing
SpaceX is the aerospace manufacturing company that is owned and operated by Elon Musk. It is one of the first privately funded space companies, so SpaceX can continue to make innovations even after the government slashed NASA funding. As the new National Geographic video shows, Musk is heavily invested in the SpaceX rocket projects.
The Falcon 9 was Musk’s pet project designed to make a reusable SpaceX rocket. The project started out by launching the Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket and dropping off a satellite in orbit. Everything went according to the plans, and then the really tricky part occurred. No rocket had ever landed in a reusable state before, so the potential landing at Cape Canaveral was really revolutionary.
The video shows Musk going through a completely understandable mix of anticipation and dread as the rocket starts to come down. He is visibly nervous to see if all his time and investments will work successfully. When the SpaceX rocket starts to land successfully, the entire SpaceX team erupts in cheers. When the rocket lands completely upright, ready to launch again, Musk is so overjoyed that he starts sprinting towards it. Alongside his team, he enthusiastically celebrates the revolutionary landing.
SpaceX Hopes to Continue Innovation by Perfect Reusable Rockets
As the video shows, Musk is not just an entrepreneur who wants to make money. He is truly enthusiastic about space travel, and Musk wants to eventually work towards creating colonies on Mars. As he looks back on the successful Falcon 9 landing, Musk muses:
“It’s kind of amazing that this window of opportunity is open for life to go beyond earth.”
The successful landing of the Falcon 9 rocket has a huge impact on future space travel. Rocket ships help to get items into space, but usually, they are a single use vehicle that is exorbitantly expensive. The only other reusable rockets developed cannot carry things into orbit.
After the first successful landing, SpaceX immediate begin launching reusable rockets. The next few months contained multiple rocket launches that delivered satellites and other things to space. All of these rockets successfully landed.
Sadly, Musk’s success came to a halt when a routine Falcon 9 launch exploded in 2016. This explosion destroyed a satellite they were launching for Facebook, and it raised many questions about the SpaceX rocket safety. The explosion has caused SpaceX to delay its future launches and focus on finding and fixing any issues with the Falcon 9 rockets. Musk still firmly believes that creating affordable, reusable rockets is the first step in making space travel available to the general public. Despite the delays, SpaceX still plans to launch astronaut-crewed rockets in 2018.
The Potential Impact of SpaceX
The innovative goals of SpaceX may one day have a huge impact on space travel. If he can manage to make space flights reasonably priced and safe, Musk may revolutionize the space industry. The impact on science and civilization is great, but in the video, Musk reveals that his real motivation is more courageous. As he says in the video, Musk believes that:
“creating a self-sustaining civilization on Mars…would be the greatest adventure ever.”
Image source: Flickr
