SpaceX launches, lands rocket

Miami : SpaceX yesterday successfully launched and landed its first unmanned Falcon 9 rocket since a costly and complicated launchpad explosion in September.

“Liftoff of the Falcon 9,” a SpaceX commentator said as the tall white rocket launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 9:54 am (1754 GMT), carrying a payload of 10 satellites for Iridium, a mobile and data communications company.

Moments after the Falcon 9 soared into the sky, the rocket’s two sections separated as planned, sending the satellites to orbit and the tall portion, known as the first stage, of the rocket back to Earth.

Cheers erupted at SpaceX mission control in Hawthorne, California as live video images showed the first stage powering its engines and landing steady and upright on a platform marked with an X in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX has successfully landed multiple rockets this way, on both land and water, as part of its effort to bring down the cost of space flight by re-using multimillion dollar components instead of jettisoning them in the ocean after launch.

The platform, or droneship, was labeled “Just Read the Instructions.”

Though the landings garner plenty of excitement, SpaceX’s primary mission was to safely deliver the payload of satellites to orbit. 

“Mission looks good,” SpaceX CEO Elon Musk wrote on Twitter.

“All satellites deployed.”

Saturday’s launch was the first in a series planned to upgrade Iridium’s global communications network.

The $3 billion project aims to send 81 satellites to space in the coming months.

The stakes for SpaceX were high after a pair of accidents.

September’s blast destroyed a $200 million satellite Facebook had planned to use to beam high-speed internet to Africa. Another explosion in June 2015 two minutes after liftoff obliterated a Dragon cargo ship packed with goods bound for the astronauts at the International Space Station.

The incidents cost SpaceX dearly, possibly pushing the privately owned company into the red, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

“That June 2015 disaster, followed by months of launch delays, contributed to a quarter-billion dollar annual loss and a six percent drop in revenue, after two years of surging sales and small profits,” the paper said after a review of internal financial documents from 2011 to 2015, forecasts for the next decade and interviews with former SpaceX employees.

Three weeks after last September’s accident, the company removed a long-standing phrase from its website saying it was “profitable and cash-flow positive.”

That “suggest(ed) both profit and cash flow had moved into the red for 2016,” the Journal said, noting that it found an operating loss for every quarter in 2015 and negative cash flow of roughly $15 million.