{"id":416951,"date":"2025-12-01T10:00:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-01T10:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/416951\/"},"modified":"2025-12-01T10:00:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-01T10:00:16","slug":"elon-musk-gives-nod-to-spacexs-massive-previously-impossible-feat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/416951\/","title":{"rendered":"Elon Musk gives nod to SpaceX\u2019s massive, previously impossible feat"},"content":{"rendered":"

Elon Musk gave a nod to one of SpaceX\u2019s most underrated feats today. Following the successful launch of the Transporter-15 mission, SpaceX seamlessly landed another Falcon 9 booster on a droneship in the middle of the ocean.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was the booster\u2019s 30th flight, a scenario that seemed impossible before SpaceX became a dominant force in spaceflight.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Elon Musk celebrates a veteran Falcon 9 booster\u2019s feat<\/strong><\/p>\n

SpaceX completed another major milestone for its Smallsat Rideshare program on Friday, successfully launching and deploying 140 spacecraft aboard a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The mission, known as Transporter-15, lifted off two days later than planned after a scrub attributed to a ground systems issue, according to SpaceFlight Now<\/a>. SpaceX confirmed that all payloads designed to separate from the rocket were deployed as planned.<\/p>\n

The Falcon 9 used for this flight was booster B1071, one of SpaceX\u2019s most heavily flown rockets. With its 30th mission completed, it becomes the second booster in SpaceX\u2019s fleet to reach that milestone<\/a>. B1071\u2019s manifest includes five National Reconnaissance Office missions, NASA\u2019s SWOT satellite, and several previous rideshare deployments, among others. Elon Musk celebrated<\/a> the milestone on X, writing \u201c30 flights of the same rocket!\u201d in his post.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Skeptics once dismissed reusability as unfeasible<\/strong><\/p>\n

While rocket landings are routine for SpaceX today, that was not always the case. Industry veterans previously questioned whether reusable rockets could ever achieve meaningful cost savings or operational reliability, often citing the Space Shuttle\u2019s partial reusability as evidence of failure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Advertisement
\n<\/a>–><\/p>\n

In 2016, Orbital ATK\u2019s Ben Goldberg argued during a panel that even if rockets could be reusable, they do not make a lot of sense. He took issue with Elon Musk\u2019s claims at the time, Ars Technica<\/a> reported, particularly when the SpaceX founder stated that fuel costs account for just a fraction of launch costs.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Goldberg noted that at most, studies showed only a 30% cost reduction for low-Earth orbit missions by using a reusable rocket. \u201cYou\u2019re not going to get 100-fold. These numbers aren\u2019t going to change by an order of magnitude. They\u2019re just not. That\u2019s the state of where we are today,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Former NASA official Dan Dumbacher, who oversaw the Space Launch System, expressed similar doubts in 2014, implying that if NASA couldn\u2019t make full reusability viable, private firms like SpaceX faced steep odds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon Musk gave a nod to one of SpaceX\u2019s most underrated feats today. Following the successful launch of…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":416952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[66,1322,159,2527,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-416951","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-elon-musk","9":"tag-featured","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-spacex","12":"tag-united-states","13":"tag-unitedstates","14":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115643733844924197","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=416951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/416951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/416952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=416951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=416951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=416951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}