Elon Musk’s reusable Falcon 9 rockets will dramatically lower the cost of space travel and make it more accessible
Elon Musk tweets SpaceX’s plans to build rocket cores for 300 missions over the next five years
By Ethan Rakin
After successfully launching the Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket last Friday (May 11), Elon Musk has shared via Twitter that it still has about “300 missions over five years” left in its lifespan.
The workhorse rocket is the most advanced in the Falcon series developed by SpaceX, the space tech company owned by the tech billionaire.
Eight minutes after the launch, a 16-storey booster that was the lower part of the rocket, successfully landed back onto a drone ship.
The upper stage continued into deep space and deployed the first geostationary communications satellite for Bangladesh called Bangabandhu-1.
According to Musk’s tweets, SpaceX will probably “build 30 to 40 rocket cores” for the Falcon 9 Block 5 to cover about 300 missions over the next five years. What that means is dramatically lower cost that will make space travel cheaper and more accessible in the very near future.
By then when it’s time to retire the Falcon 9, the Big Falcon Rocket or BFR, a next-generation reusable launch vehicle and spacecraft capable of transporting anybody to the moon and beyond will take over.
