Earlier this week, SpaceX finally picked up one of the handful of used rockets it had stashed in the company’s hangar, checked it out, and figured, “eh, we can probably use this one again.” Even better, a year ago, this hilariously southern guy totally called it: Elon Musk is definitely gon’ reuse that thang.
Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company conducted a critical stage firing of a Falcon 9 rocket booster on Tuesday, re-using the very same rocket it first managed to land on Of Course I Still Love You, a drone-ship in the Atlantic ocean, in April of 2016. Now, that lucky booster tube could be headed back to space.
Usually, the process you use for selecting a t-shirt to wear in the morning isn’t used for multi-million-dollar explosive tubes used for launching things into space, but Elon Musk’s company has been geared toward reusing rockets for multiple missions for well over a year, and sees the practice as the future of economically efficient spaceflight.
SpaceX showed off the successful test at its McGregor, Texas facility on Instagram.
All told, SpaceX has seven intact rockets that it’s managed to land and recover. If all goes well, the rocket could potentially get back into space in March, just over a year after it first landed.
And because space science is cool and some joy is still pure in the world, here’s the original video of the rocket on its way out of Kennedy Space Center in Florida, narrated by a very stoked, very southern SpaceX fan.
