On Friday Elon Musk gave his social media followers a bird’s-eye view of the SpaceX factory floor in Hawthorne, California. The beautifully-shot aerial footage was likely recorded using a drone, zooming at slow speeds around Falcon rockets in construction. With the ASMR-like whirring of subtle factory construction in the background, some of the visuals that the drone captured are pretty incredible.
Sliding around the long, cylindrical shapes of the Falcon rockets, we get a glimpse of SpaceX employees that definitely gives a sense of scale to the rockets themselves. One captivating image showes what appears to be the inside of a Falcon rocket, with a color palette of crimson and chrome.
Using social media air time to illustrate the impressiveness of SpaceX’s Falcon rockets makes a lot of sense right now. Musk recently authored a paper in the journal New Space detailing his plans for the human colonization of Mars. To Musk, a significant hurdle to making this plan a reality is the pricey cost of space travel, so a lot of what SpaceX has been doing is trying to find ways to build and reuse spacecraft technology to make it more affordable.
Falcon 9 rockets are a big part of this picture, as they’re being constructed to be a reusable spacecraft for launching cargo and humans alike into space. At this point, thanks largely to its contract with NASA, SpaceX is aiming to launch its spacecraft every two to three weeks, with the goal of 23 flights a year. We’re going to need a lot more drones.
