For the first time in the history of commercial spaceflight, a used spacecraft has blasted off on a mission to deliver cargo to the International Space Station (ISS).

After lightning strikes delayed the launch on Thursday (June 1), lingering storm clouds parted just enough for SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to safely lift off from NASA's historic Pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida today (June 3).

The Falcon 9 rocket, topped with SpaceX's first refurbished Dragon cargo craft, took to the skies at 5:07 p.m. EDT (2107 GMT). About 8 minutes after liftoff, the first-stage rocket booster returned to Earth to stick a landing at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. [Launch Photos: SpaceX's 1st Reused Dragon Spacecraft]

A little over 10 minutes into the flight, the Dragon separated from the Falcon 9's second stage, deployed its solar arrays and began its three-day trek to the ISS. On Monday (June 5), the spacecraft will dock at the space station's Harmony module, delivering close to 6,000 lbs. (2,700 kilograms) of supplies and science experiments to the Expedition 52 crew.

Today's launch marked the 100th mission to lift off from Launch Complex 39A, where NASA's Apollo missions and dozens of space shuttle missions were also launched. "For [SpaceX], it's the seventh launch this year, and you can tell that we picked up the rate significantly," Hans Koenigsmann, vice president of flight reusability at SpaceX, said in a prelaunch briefing on Wednesday (May 31).

"We are hoping to stay at this rate through the rest of the year and work our backlog down. We're hoping to also fly more and more refurbished Dragons, and the same is true for the first stages," he said. "The next launch after this is also refurbished first stage."

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying a used Dragon cargo craft blasts off from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on June 3, 2017. (Image credit: SpaceX)

Another historic 1st for SpaceX

Today's mission is the latest in a series of historic firsts for SpaceX, the private spaceflight company founded by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk. In March, the company successfully launched and landed a used rocket booster for the first time. SpaceX is also the first and only company to have landed a rocket booster during an orbital mission (though Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin has achieved this multiple times on suborbital journeys). And in 2012, SpaceX's Dragon capsule became the first private spacecraft to dock at the ISS.

With the ultimate (and highly ambitious) goal of being able to reuse all major components of their launch vehicles, SpaceX is now putting the Dragon to the test. The capsule first flew on a cargo mission to the space station on Sept. 21, 2014, for the cargo resupply mission CRS-4, and it returned to Earth with a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean one month later.

"Once this capsule landed, we refurbished it, inspected it, made sure everything is qualified for the next flight," Koenigsmann said.

But the capsule isn't 100 percent reused parts, Koenigsmann added. Certain parts had to be replaced for a number of reasons, such as exposure to seawater during splashdown, he said, and the heat shield needed to be replaced for safety. "But I can tell you the majority of this Dragon has been in space before and has been docked to the station for a couple of weeks."

The next steps toward full reusability for SpaceX involve figuring out how to refurbish the second-stage rocket booster and the payload fairings — an ambitious but important goal, Koenigsmann said.

"This whole notion of reuse is something that's very important to the entire space industry and NASA as well as Space X and others," Kirk Shireman, manager of NASA's ISS program, said in the briefing. "The idea of reuse is important for economic reasons as well as technical reasons." [SpaceX Gaining Substantial Cost Savings From Reused Falcon 9]

Science on board

Along with food, water, clothing and other gear for the astronauts at the space station, the Dragon will deliver plenty of science experiments.

The experiments on board will support about 220 investigations currently happening at the space station. "They span a multitude of scientific disciplines, including biological research, the physical sciences, the human research that we're doing with the astronauts, the technology demonstration studying Earth and space from the ISS, and then last but not least, the educational activities that students have an opportunity to participate in," Camille Alleyne, an associate space station program scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, said at the briefing.

One astrophysics experiment, called the Neutron star Interior Composition ExploreR (NICER), will investigate the possibility of utilizing neutron stars — the ultradense cores of dead stars — to develop a type of interstellar GPS navigation system.

A new, experimental type of solar panel is also flying to the space station on the Dragon. Called the Roll Out Solar Array (ROSA), these new solar arrays are smaller, lighter and more efficient than the current solar panels that power the ISS.

The Dragon also contains some live passengers, including 40 mice and thousands of fruit flies. For a project called Rodent Research-5, the mice will help researchers study a new drug for osteoporosis, or bone density loss. The fruit flies will help investigators study the prolonged effects of spaceflight on the human heart.

More Earth-observation instruments are also on their way to the ISS. The Multiple-User System for Earth Sensing (MUSES) facility, developed by Teledyne Brown Engineering, contains new high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers, bringing new capabilities to the space station's suite of Earth-observing technologies.

Email Hanneke Weitering at hweitering@space.com or follow her @hannekescience. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com. </s> Success all around for today’s SpaceX mission. The company successfully launched a Dragon spacecraft that is on its way to the International Space Station. SpaceX also successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral.

The weather was cloudy but it looks like it wasn’t enough to stop SpaceX from launching a rocket. At 9:39 ET, the Falcon 9 took off from the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A.

While this name might not sound familiar, the Apollo 11 mission used this launch complex to send the first humans to the Moon back in 1969. This is the first time this launch complex is used since the 2011 Space Shuttle launch.

Two and a half minutes later, the second stage parted ways with the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket. The first stage was on its way back to Earth, while the second stage was carrying the Dragon spacecraft.

And just eight minutes after the initial takeoff, the first stage successfully landed at Cape Canaveral.

Meanwhile in space, the Dragon spacecraft deployed its solar panels and is now going to orbit around the Earth for a couple of days until it gets closer to the International Space Station. The spacecraft is carrying 5,500 pounds of supplies for the astronauts currently in space. </s> (Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP). In this photo provided by NASA, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, June 3, 2017. SpaceX is trying a...

(Bill Ingalls/NASA via AP). In this photo provided by NASA, the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Saturday, June 3, 2017. SpaceX is trying a...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The Latest on SpaceX trying to launch first recycled supply ship to the International Space Station (all times local).:

SpaceX has launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station.

An unmanned Falcon rocket lifted off Saturday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center with a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago.

Eight minutes later, the first-stage booster used to launch it was back home in Cape Canaveral following another successful landing. SpaceX Mission Control declared, "The Falcon has landed." Soon afterward, the refurbished Dragon was safe in orbit.

The booster used Saturday is new, but as is now the custom, returned for a vertical touchdown. It's all part of SpaceX's long-term effort to save money through reusability.

As for the Dragon, when it reaches the orbiting lab Monday, it will be the first returning craft since the now-retired shuttles.

SpaceX has launched its first recycled cargo ship to the International Space Station.

An unmanned Falcon rocket lifted off Saturday from Florida's Kennedy Space Center with a Dragon capsule that made a station delivery nearly three years ago. When this refurbished Dragon reaches the orbiting lab Monday, it will be the first returning craft since the now-retired shuttles.

The same capsule is back for take two after a few modifications and much testing.

The first-stage booster used Saturday is new, but as is now the custom, will attempt to return to Cape Canaveral following liftoff. It's all part of SpaceX's long-term effort to save money through reusability.

Besides the usual supplies, the 6,000-pound shipment includes mice and flies for research.

The flight was delayed two days by thunderstorms.

SpaceX is trying again to launch its first recycled supply ship to the International Space Station.

Forecasters at Florida's Kennedy Space Center are cautiously optimistic storms won't halt Saturday afternoon's countdown like they did Thursday.

Atop the Falcon rocket is a Dragon capsule loaded with 6,000 pounds of station cargo. The same Dragon made a delivery to the orbiting outpost for NASA in 2014 and then was refurbished for an unprecedented second flight. SpaceX will attempt to recover this new rocket booster for recycling, too. The first-stage booster will aim for a landing at Cape Canaveral following liftoff.

SpaceX hopes to slash launch costs by reusing its rockets and capsules. For now, savings are minimal because of all the inspections and tests performed on the already flown parts.

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. </s> A refurbished robotic Dragon spaceship rocketed into orbit from Florida on Saturday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 launcher, hauling nearly 6,000 pounds of crew provisions and biological, astrophysics and space technology experiments on a two-day trip to the International Space Station.

The unpiloted capsule soared into a late afternoon sky from launch pad 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at 5:07:38 p.m. EDT (2107:38 GMT) Saturday, two days later than planned after a thunderstorm prevented liftoff Thursday.

Nine Merlin 1D engines, generating a combined 1.7 million pounds of thrust, powered the 213-foot-tall (65-meter) Falcon 9 rocket through a high-altitude cloud deck as the launcher arced to the northeast, aligning with the space station’s orbital track.

It was the 100th launch from historic pad 39A, the previous home to Saturn 5 moon rockets and space shuttles. SpaceX began launch operations there in February, and has now flown six rockets from the seaside launch complex.

The Falcon 9’s first stage engines shut down and deployed the rocket’s second stage more than 40 miles (65 kilometers) over the Atlantic Ocean, then the booster activated nitrogen cold gas thrusters to flip around and fly tail first.

While the upper stage accelerated into orbit, three of the Merlin’s first stage engines ignited to begin maneuvers to return the first stage to Landing Zone 1, and two more braking burns slowed the 156-foot-tall (47-meter) for a smooth vertical touchdown around 9 miles (14 kilometers) from where the mission started.

The landing marked the fifth time SpaceX has returned a rocket booster to Cape Canaveral — all successful. The commercial launch company has recovered 11 rockets in 16 tries overall, a figure that includes landings at sea.

SpaceX aims to reuse the first stages, an initiative the company says will slash launch costs. The rocket that launched on the space station resupply run Saturday was entirely new, but the primary structure of the gumdrop-shaped Dragon cargo capsule on top previously flew on a 34-day orbital mission in September and October 2014, another first for SpaceX.

Engineers examined and stripped the spacecraft’s structure after it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean on Oct. 25, 2014, following a visit to the space station, but the “majority” of the Dragon cargo capsule is the original article, according to Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s director of flight reliability.

He said engineers compared the structural loads and shaking components inside the Dragon capsule experienced on its 2014 flight with their design limits.

“That tells us how much life the component has, and we make sure that the component has enough life for the next round,” Koenigsmann said. “There is a statistical variation, so you have to make a worst-case assumption, basically, to be on the safe side.”

SpaceX goes through a similar review of parts on Falcon 9 boosters before clearing them for a re-flight, he said.

Kirk Shireman, NASA’s program manager for the International Space Station, said before Saturday’s launch that the space agency expects to approve SpaceX plans to re-fly more Dragon capsules and Falcon 9 boosters on future cargo missions to the orbiting research outpost.

SpaceX has two multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to ferry equipment to and from the space station. The terms of the deal call for at least 26 missions, and 10 of those are in the books, including a failed cargo launch in 2015.

NASA has also contracted with SpaceX to develop a Crew Dragon vehicle capable to ferrying astronauts to and from the space station beginning as soon as next year.

Officials said SpaceX’s next cargo mission to the station, scheduled for launch some time in August, will employ a newly-manufactured Dragon capsule.

“We share the results with NASA, and review them together, and we conclude that we can either fly a component, or in some cases, we have to make a swap with a new component,” Koenigsmann said, adding that such occurrences were “very few.”

According to Koenigsmann, SpaceX technicians replaced several items that were exposed to salt water after splashdown, such as batteries and the capsule’s heat shield. But the hull, thrusters, harnessing, propellant tanks, and some avionics boxes are original, he said.

“I can tell you the majority of this Dragon has been in space before,” Koenigsmann said.

Officials did not say if NASA was compensated for its approval of SpaceX’s plans to launch a refurbished Dragon capsule to approach the space station.

Without specifying details, Shireman said the agreement is part of a normal back-and-forth between the government and the commercial operator, in which one party barters with the other.

The Dragon spacecraft is on a two-day voyage to the space station, where it is scheduled to arrive at 10 a.m. EDT (1400 GMT) Monday, when astronauts Peggy Whitson and Jack Fischer will grapple the approaching capsule with the station’s Canadian-built robotic arm.

“The space station is in excellent shape, ready to receive Dragon,” said Ven Feng, manager of the space station transportation integration office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The robot arm will move the Dragon supply ship to a berthing port on the station’s Harmony module, where it is scheduled to stay for nearly one month.

The station crew, reduced to three after the landing of a Russian cosmonaut and French astronaut Friday, will unpack 3,761 pounds (1,665 kilograms) of equipment and experiments loaded inside the Dragon capsule’s previously-flown pressurized module.

Some food and provisions for the station’s crew are strapped inside the Dragon freighter, but research investigations take up the bulk of the ship’s volume.

“Really, the utility of this SpaceX mission is science,” Feng said. “We have literally tons and tons of science going up on this mission.”

Three payloads stowed inside the Dragon’s external rear trunk will be be removed robotically.

One of the unpressurized experiments, NASA’s Neutron Star Interior Composition Explorer, will study the super-dense leftovers from violent supernova explosions. Made of 56 individual X-ray telescopes, the NICER instrument will observe neutron stars, the collapsed city-sized remnants of stars that have used up all of their nuclear fuel.

Scientists compare the density of a neutron star to cramming the mass Mount Everest into a sugar cube. One teaspoon of neutron star matter would weight a billion tons on Earth, according to NASA.

Developed by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Laboratory, the neutron star observer will spend 18 months detecting X-ray signals coming from deep space.

“Neutron stars are fantastical stars that are extraordinary in many ways,” said Zaven Arzoumanian, NICER’s deputy principal investigator and science lead at Goddard. “They are the densest objects in the universe, they are the fastest-spinning objects known, they are the most strongly magnetic objects known.”

The NICER science team wants to know the structure and composition of neutron stars, which are so extreme that normal atoms are pulverized, freeing subatomic particles like neutrons, protons and electrons.

“As soon as you go below the surface of a neutron star, the pressures and densities rise extremely rapidly, and soon you’re in an environment that you can’t produce in any lab on Earth,” said Slavko Bogdanov, a research scientist at Columbia University who leads the NICER light curve modeling group.

Unlike black holes, which develop from explosions of stars more than 20 times the mass of the sun, neutron stars can be directly observed.

“They emit light all across the spectrum, from radio waves to visible light up to X-rays and gamma rays, primarily in narrow beams from their magnetic poles,” Arzoumanian said. “Just like the Earth, the magnetic poles on a neutron star are not necessarily aligned with the spin of the star, so you can get narrow beams that sweep as the star spins, just like a lighthouse.

“And if we happen to be in the path of the sweep we see a flash everytime one of these beams go by and the stars from a distance appear to be pulsing, so they’re called pulsars,” Arzoumanian said.

Scientists will also demonstrate the potential of using the timing of pulses from neutron stars for deep space navigation.

“We’re going to look at a subset of pulsars in the sky called millisecond pulsars,” said Keith Gendreau, NICER’s principal investigator at Goddard. “In some of these millisecond pulsars, the pulses that we see are so regular that they remind us of atomic clocks.”

Atomic clocks are the basis of the Global Positioning System satellites, according to Gendreau.

Another payload bolted inside the Dragon spacecraft’s trunk is a mounting platform for multiple Earth-imaging instruments, such as high-resolution digital cameras and hyperspectral imagers.

Developed commercially by Teledyne Brown, the MUSES device to be attached outside the space station is designed to accommodate several Earth-observing cameras by providing the individual instruments with pointing, power and data relay connections.

The third unpressurized experiment on Saturday’s launch is the Roll-Out Solar Array, or ROSA, made by Deployable Space Systems of Santa Barbara, California.

The U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory funded the solar array test flight, which is intended to test the structure’s ability to extend and retract, check its resilience to vibrations and other forces, measure its thermal gradients, and verify it can generate electricity.

The new solar array design, which unfolds like a party favor, could be used on future commercial satellites.

The array launched rolled up in a spool, but the experiment will be pulled from Dragon’s trunk around nine days after launch by the station robotic arm. While remaining in the arm’s grasp, the solar array will extend to a length of about 15 feet (5 meters) and remain unfurled for around a week.

ROSA is important to the space industry,” said Jeremy Banik, the ROSA demonstration’s principal investigator from the Air Force Research Laboratory. “All spacecraft need power, and tradiational solar panels are made with square, flat plates that accordian fold with mechanical hinges.

“The problem is, these panels tend to be heavy and bulky, and we just can’t make them any bigger than what we do today. ROSA solves this problem by shrinking mass by 20 percent and stowed volume by a factor of four over these rigid panels,” Banik said.

Once the week-long test is finished, the experiment will be returned to the Dragon’s trunk for disposal.

Live animals were also aboard Saturday’s launch, including 40 mice inside specially-designed transporters for an investigation into a treatment that could combat bone loss in astronauts on long-duration space missions and osteoporosis in patients on the ground.

Once the mice arrive at the space station, astronauts will treat the rodents with NELL-1, a therapeutic treatment designed to promote bone growth, according to Chia Soo, the chief scientist for the experiment and a professor of plastic, reconstructive and orthopaedic surgery at UCLA.

“Men and women past the age of 50, on the average, lose about a half-percent of bone mass per year,” Soo said. “But in microgravity conditions, the astronaut, on average, loses anywhere from 1 to 2 percent of bone mass per month.”

She added that bone loss in astronauts has “tremendous implications for humans with respect to long-term space travel or space habitation in microgravity because we end up progressively losing bone mass.”

Twenty of the mice will return to Earth alive with the SpaceX Dragon supply ship in early July, the first time the commercial spacecraft has landed with live animals on-board. The 20 mice that come back alive will go to UCLA’s laboratories for additional research and treatment.

The other 20 mice will remain on the space station for more observation and comparative studies with the mice on Earth. All of the animals will eventually be euthanized.

“If successful, this will have tremendous implications for patients on Earth because if you look at statistics … approximately one in every two to three females over the age of 50, or one in every four to five males over the age of 50, will have an osteoporosis-related fracture,” Soo said.

“We are hoping this study will give us some insights on how NELL-1 can work under these extreme conditions and if it can work for treating microgravity-related bone loss, which is a very accelerated, severe form of bone loss, then perhaps it can (be used) for patients one day on Earth who have bone loss due to trauma or due to aging or disease,” Soo said.

A swarm of fruit flies launched to the space station to examine how prolonged spaceflight affects their heart function.

The hearts of the insects beat at about same rate as the human heart, making it a useful analog, scientists said.

Researchers are sending between 4,000 and 6,000 fruit fly eggs to the space station, where they will hatch before coming back to Earth aboard the Dragon spacecraft.

“We would like to understand the role of microgravity on astronaut heart function in order to try to prevent long-term effects when they are in space for long periods and after they come back,” said Karen Ocorr, a co-investigator on the fruit fly experiment from the Sanford Burnham Research Institute.

“But there are real-world implications as well for people who are spending long periods of time in bedrest or immobilized,” Ocorr said. “We expect that what we find in our studies on the ISS will have implications for maintaining cardiac function in those sorts of situations.”

Saturday’s successful launch clears the way for four more SpaceX missions over the next month.

Next on the company’s jam-packed manifest is BulgariaSat 1, Bulgaria’s first communications satellite, scheduled for liftoff from the Kennedy Space Center on June 15.

BulgariaSat 1’s launch window June 15 opens at 2:10 p.m. EDT (1810 GMT) and extends two hours.

Koenigsmann told reporters he did not expect BulgariaSat 1’s mid-June launch to be delayed after the two-day slip in the cargo mission’s blastoff this weekend. BulgariaSat 1, which is already being prepared for launch in a processing facility at Cape Canaveral, will launch on a previously-flown Falcon 9 booster.

SpaceX plans its fourth launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California on June 25 with the second batch of 10 small new-generation satellites for Iridium’s orbiting voice and data relay network.

The Intelsat 35e high-throughput communications satellite will follow no earlier than July 1 from SpaceX’s Florida launch base.

The SpaceX launch teams have conducted three launches in the last 34 days, with three more planned in the next four weeks.

Ground crews, engineers and managers are “learning to deal with this operation better and better every time,” Koenigsmann said after Saturday’s launch. “The situation that we launch from both coasts is something that is somewhat new for us.

“We’ve had this with a little bit of separation in the past, and we’ve set up the teams to be able to cope with that, and have the ability to launch from both sites within a short period of time,” he said. </s> SpaceX successfully launches a Falcon 9 rocket in Florida on Sunday on a resupply mission to the International Space Station. The rocket takes off from a launchpad at the Kennedy Space Center that has seen off some of Nasa’s most famous missions, but has gone unused since the agency retired its space shuttle fleet in 2011 </s> The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, with the Dragon spacecraft onboard, is seen at Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 3, 2017

SpaceX on Saturday blasted off a shipment of food and supplies for the astronauts living at the International Space Station using for the first time a vessel that had flown before.

The refurbished Dragon cargo capsule soared into space aboard a Falcon 9 rocket at 5:07 pm (2107 GMT) from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"Three, two, one, and liftoff," said NASA spokesman Mike Curie as the rocket blazed a steady upward path into the clouds.

The last time this particular spaceship flew to space was in 2014.

The Dragon is packed with almost 6,000 pounds (2,700 kilograms) of science research, crew supplies and hardware and should arrive at the ISS Monday.

The supplies for special experiments include live mice to study the effects of osteoporosis and fruit flies for research on microgravity's impact on the heart.

The spacecraft is also loaded with solar panels and equipment to study neutron stars.

About 10 minutes after launch, SpaceX successfully returned the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket back to a controlled landing at Cape Canaveral.

The rocket powered its engines and guided itself down to Landing Zone One, not far from the launch site.

"The first stage is back," Curie said on NASA live webcast, as video images showed the tall, narrow portion of the rocket touch down steadily in a cloud of smoke.

SpaceX said it marked the company's fifth successful landing on solid ground. Several of its Falcon 9 rockets have returned upright to platforms floating in the ocean.

The effort is part of SpaceX's push to make spaceflight cheaper by re-using costly rocket and spaceship components after each launch, rather than ditching them in the ocean.

The launch was the 100th from NASA's historic launch pad 39A, the starting point for the Apollo missions to the Moon in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as a total of 82 shuttle flights.

Explore further Lightning strike postpones SpaceX launch until Saturday

© 2017 AFP </s> SpaceX successfully launched the Falcon 9 rocket for its 10th resupply mission to the International Space Station. The spacecraft is carrying more than 5,000 pounds of supplies and research materials. </s> SpaceX successfully launched a Dragon spacecraft filled with supplies and science experiments for the International Space Station.

The spacecraft "Space X Dragon", launched Monday from Florida to orbit, is scheduled to join the International Space Station later this week. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, said the space capsule, loaded with 2,600 kg, was launched on a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral.

During a prelaunch news conference, Pete Hasbrook, NASA’s associate programme scientist for International Space Station Programme Science Office at the agency’s Johnson Space Centre in Houston, praised the work of Commercial Resupply Services companies.

"The International Space Station is a world-class and multi- disciplinary laboratory in space," he said. "Our commercial providers help in bringing our sciences forward and keep it going on space station and bringing benefits back to Earth." </s> It’s been a busy time for Elon Musk and SpaceX, lately. Earlier this week, the company launched 64 satellites (and a art project known as the Orbital Reflector) in what was the largest rideshare mission in history. The mission was also historic because it involved a booster making its third successful landing. And this was after Musk released more details about his proposed BFR, henceforth known as the “Starship”

And earlier today (Wednesday Dec. 5th), SpaceX launched its sixteenth Commercial Resupply Services mission (CRS-16) to the International Space Station (ISS). While the deployment of the Dragon spacecraft was successful, the first stage booster did not make it back to the landing pad. After suffering from an apparent malfunction in one of its grid fins, the booster fell into the sea – but remained intact and will be retrieved.

The mission lifted off at 10:16 am PST (01:16 p.m. EST), from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. The Dragon spacecraft, which had previously been used for the CRS-10 mission in February of 2017, carried more than 2,540 kg (5,600 lbs) of supplies and payloads. Among these were materials that are critical to supporting the ongoing research and investigations aboard the ISS.

As with previous launches, the company began live-streaming the launch via webcast. About seven minutes after liftoff, the second stage and Dragon spacecraft separated from the Falcon 9’s first stage and proceeded to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). At 10:26 am PST (01:26 pm EST), SpaceX announced “Second stage engine burn complete. Dragon confirmed in good orbit,” followed shortly thereafter by confirmation that its solar arrays had deployed.

The first stage then began descending towards Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. This was to be the twenty-seventh time that SpaceX had managed to successfully retrieve a first stage booster. However, 7 minutes and 25 seconds after the launch, the first stage began tumbling uncontrollably towards the surface. This was apparently due to the failure of one of the grid fins, which stabilize the first stage during its descent.

Luckily, the mission controllers were able to stabilize the rocket in time with some bursts from the engine, bringing the first stage in for a soft landing on water off the coast of Florida. At 10:34 am PST (0:34 EST), Musk tweeted the apparent cause of the failed landing and addressed possible changes to avoid similar problems in the future.

“Grid fin hydraulic pump stalled, so Falcon landed just out to sea. Appears to be undamaged & is transmitting data. Recovery ship dispatched.” he said, adding later, “Pump is single string. Some landing systems are not redundant, as landing is considered ground safety critical, but not mission critical. Given this event, we will likely add a backup pump & lines.”

Engines stabilized rocket spin just in time, enabling an intact landing in water! Ships en route to rescue Falcon. pic.twitter.com/O3h8eCgGJ7 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2018

Musk also posted the video of the first stage’s descent, which showed it spinning as it fell to Earth, how its spin rate was slowly arrested with correctional thrusts, and how it touched down on the ocean and fell sideways into the water. Musk also indicated that ships were en route to retrieve the booster. When asked if the booster would be reused, Musk replied, “We may use it for an internal SpaceX mission.”

While the first stage booster did not land as intended, the fact that it survived the descent is no small feat. In addition, this should not distract from the fact that the launch itself went by the numbers. Currently, the Dragon spacecraft is on schedule to arrive at the ISS by Saturday, Dec. 8th. Once there, the crew will use the station’s 17.6 m (57.7 ft) robotic arm (aka. Canadarm2) to capture the Dragon spacecraft and attach it to the orbiting laboratory.

The arrival of the Dragon spacecraft will also be the subject of a live webcast. Coverage will begin at about 02:00 a.m. PST (0:500 a.m. EST) with the capture expected to happen about 1 hour later.

In the meantime, you catch the replay of the launch here:

Further Reading: SpaceX, Twitter, ArsTechnica
SpaceX successfully launches a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center, placing a Dragon spacecraft in orbit and recovering the launcher's first stage. The spacecraft will resupply the International Space Station.