SpaceX & Travel

SpaceX is bringing travel to the cosmos.

Cody Winkelman, Co-Sports Editor

Falcon 9, the first orbital class rocket capable of re-flight, carried NASA’s TESS mission into orbit. Photo courtesy of Flickr.

In recent years, there has been a push to make space travel cheaper and easier to access. SpaceX is a privately funded company that “designs, manufactures and launches advanced rockets and spacecraft.” They have been up to the task of making these advancements.

Just this year, SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 rocket of which the first stage returned intact and ready to be launched again. This sort of technology already has and will make space travel cheaper in the future.

CEO of SpaceX, Elon Musk, posted on SpaceX’s website, “If one can figure out how to effectively reuse rockets just like airplanes, the cost of access to space will be reduced by as much as a factor of a hundred.  A fully reusable vehicle has never been done before. That really is the fundamental breakthrough needed to revolutionize access to space.”

SpaceX’s end goal is to make a fully reusable vehicle, like the ones we see in “Star Wars.” SpaceX has taken the first step towards that goal by making the first stage of a rocket reusable.

Mr. Christopher Asmann, a science teacher here at Bothell High, told us how excited he is that these advancements are taking place. He then explained how he  “Expect[s] that students from BHS will end up working for private space firms in many different roles.”