Saturday, December 26, 2015

Tech Story - Follow-up - SpaceX success with rocket booster recovery

Mon, 20 Dec 2015, USA date. SpaceX were successful with their experiment of flying their rocket booster back to base and soft-landing it. Video coverage: skip to 31:00 min mark for the landing.
http://www.spacex.com/webcast/
(Scroll down past the still photos for the video.)

I monitored news coverage. From here in NZ I saw reasonable coverage by the NZ Herald newspaper website and the BBC. A big disappointment was TVNZ One News which is the biggest TV broadcaster in NZ. This has a history as a semi-commercial broadcaster with public service broadcasting aims along the lines of a mini BBC. In recent years, while still government owned, it has gone more and more commercial and received a lot of criticism for dumbing down. I suggest that poor coverage of this event supports that assertion.  I watched most of the 6pm broadcast news that day and next day and saw no coverage. Its website had brief coverage but only of the launch while missing the main point by failing to show or comment on the recovery.

Backstory "The Why and How of Landing Rockets" at:
http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-rockets

Monday, December 21, 2015

Tech Story - SpaceX rocket launch today to attempt space travel breakthrough

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Major tech news story with big implications. SpaceX is launching satellites today but it is what they are going to attempt afterwards that could make history. They will try to fly the rocket booster back to base and soft-land it so they can reuse it.  Rocket reuse has been an engineering challenge for at least 50 years and if today's experiment works it will be a major advance in bringing down the cost of spaceflight and opening up "the final frontier".

Backstory "The Why and How of Landing Rockets" at:
http://www.spacex.com/news/2015/06/24/why-and-how-landing-rockets