SpaceX celebrates its sixth success — Falcon 9 rocket has landed on a ship at sea early morning on Sunday.
The corporation SpaceX got one more reason to be proud of its well-done job. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 05:26 GMT on August 14. The rocket was carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit.
The sixth success in the landings of the rocket means a lot to engineers from Elon Musk’s corporation. During last eight month, the private spaceflight company landed its rockets sixth times. The landings on the ship on a sea become more and more accurate, time by time. Sunday’s touchdown of SpaceX marked success number six, as you can see on the video.
According to the data from SpaceX, less than 9 minutes after launching the satellites, the rocket’s first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called ‘Of Course I Still Love You’. The ship was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast.
SpaceX launch: JCSAT 16 details
Made by Space Systems/Loral of Palo Alto, California, JCSAT 16 will become a spare satellite for SKY Perfect JSAT Corp., a Tokyo-based company which provides broadcast relay capacity over the Asia-Pacific. JCSAT 16 is the second Space Systems/Loral-built satellite SpaceX will launch for SKY Perfect JSAT this year, coming after the May 6 blastoff of the company’s JCSAT 14 telecom station.
The JCSAT 16 satellite inside a test chamber at Space Systems/Loral in Palo Alto, California
