The Falcon has landed!

Progress in science is often very slow. Ask a graduate student and you would hear about the countless hours that were spent in trying to come up with a hypothesis, planning the experiments, testing the hypothesis, only to come up with results that were totally different from what was expected to be observed in the beginning. At times these results lead to roadblocks which have been to sidestepped to make progress; sometimes the results lead to dead ends, which is every scientist's nightmare and just a few times they point in the direction of new science, which is exciting. Most scientists understand that this is the nature of work when exploring the boundary between what is already known, the collective human knowledge, and the vast sea of unknowns that is waiting to be unraveled.

Rarely, things work exactly as expected; no hiccups, no glitches and joy that you get as a result is really hard to explain. When everything works as expected and you discover something new, you have figured out something about the inner working of Nature that no other human has ever discovered. Such days are so rare that you never get too used to them or take them for granted. Every time those days happen, they are special and they should always be celebrated.

Today was one such day for the scientists and engineers at SpaceX, the private space transportation company owned by Elon Musk. SpaceX has been launching its Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station (ISS), since 2012. It is generally used as a commercial resupply vehicle by NASA to the ISS, since the end of the space shuttle program. To propel this spacecraft to the Low Earth Orbit (LEO) where the ISS orbits the earth, SpaceX uses the Falcon 9 rocket. As efficient and cheap space transportation is the main goal of SpaceX, reusability of their spacecraft and the rockets is paramount to making commercial space travel economical. Though the Dragon spacecraft is reusable, the early versions of the rocket were not, as SpaceX could not recover the rockets even though they were equipped with parachutes. Hence they decided to work on a new approach based on vertical descent and landing of the rocket after it delivers its payload. This had never been successfully done before.

After several tests though 2013-2015, today, for the first time they successfully launched the Dragon spacecraft and the first stage of the rocket landed back on earth, successfully. What is astounding here is the number of things that had to go right for this approach to be executed flawlessly. The rocket had to take off without any glitches from Cape Canaveral, ascend to an altitude of 77 km (48 miles) while travelling at 6400 kmph (4000 mph) when first stage of the rocket detached from the Dragon space craft, slow down and land vertically on a platform stationed 300 km (186 miles) off the coast of Florida, in the Atlantic ocean; all of this happening in less than 9 minutes.

Here is the video of the launch from earlier today. Though the entire video is fun to watch, if you are interested only in the launch, start watching from 17:00.

As you can see in the video, it is said several times that the landing might end up in a huge fireball, which is fine as long as they get data from it which will guide the future launches. That's how uncertain the entire procedure was and it is amazing how they were able to pull it off. It is also wonderful to see the excitement of the scientists and the engineers in the room. It definitely was contagious.

What a wonderful demonstration of the amazing potential of mankind! It is a testament to the power of scientific inquiry to come up with an accurate description of the world around us.

Edit: SpaceX has edited the original video. Hence the launch starts at 17:00 and not at 25:30, as previously mentioned.