Let the drum roll begin….
SpaceX is going to try to land a rocket on floating barge in the Atlantic Ocean, a crucial step towards Elon Musk’s goal of reducing space flight costs by a factor of 100.
Drone spaceport ship heads to its hold position in the Atlantic to prepare for a rocket landing pic.twitter.com/kXYHGVKTfE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2015
The rocket that blasts a space capsule into orbit usually just falls back into the ocean and isn’t reused. Musk wants to change that.
The last two Falcon 9 rockets that delivered payloads into orbit performed “soft landings” into the ocean.
The accuracy of those landings had a 6-mile margin of error. This time, SpaceX will attempt to land Tuesday’s rocket on a platform that is 300 feet by 170 feet.
Musk estimates the likelihood of the rocket sticking the landing is about “50 percent” because, well, rockets are tricky.
In a blog post last month, Musk said stabilizing a Falcon 9 upon reentry is “like trying to balance a rubber broomstick on your hand in the middle of a wind storm.”
If you’re up at 3 a.m. PST on Tuesday, you can watch the SpaceX launch live.