SpaceX To Launch A Piece Of History 22,000mi Above Earth

Elon Musk's SpaceX aerospace company is making history by reusing an orbital rocket booster that it already previously launched and landed.

Twice is nice: @SpaceX reusable rocket touches down safely on land for only the second time https://t.co/ypp35lxxsi pic.twitter.com/qBYu3JGaCf

— BBC Focus Magazine (@sciencefocus) July 18, 2016

In a statement released by the company on Tuesday, they have worked out a deal that puts the expensive SES-10 satellite on top of a recycled Falcon 9 - the 229-foot-tall rocket that can launch 25 tons of payload. So far, the company managed to launch and land six of these Falcon 9 first-stage booster rockets into space, but this will be the first time that they will be reusing one.

These booster rockets are called as such because they are the ones to "boost" a second-stage rocket to a height where the latter can ignite their engines and deliver a payload in orbit. After using most of its fuel, the booster then detaches and drops back to earth with a hypersonic speed, refiring its engines to land gently on a drone ship.

A spokesperson from the company told Business Insider that the historic affair of the SES 10 will "launch using a flight-proven first stage from CRS-8 mission in April." This was the first rocket ever to have landed on a ship at sea - an authentic piece of history, as far as spaceflight is concerned.

The spokesperson continued, "We are carrying out careful inspections throughout the entire vehicle, testing each engine individually, and planning a pre-launch static fire at the Cape."

There had been a brief competition regarding the first contemporary rocket company to launch, land, and reuse a rocket booster, with Amazon's Blue Origin claiming history. However, as Musk noted, the Blue Origin launch was actually suborbital, which means that it only launched to a height of 60 miles, and did not send anything into orbit. Doing so would require hundreds of times more energy that what Blue Origin's New Shepherd rocket system did.

While reusable rockets are not exactly new - they have been in use since the 1960s, SpaceX was the first to do so with the holy grail of reusability in mind. For a rocket to meet the "holy grail" of specifications, it should be capable of transporting a spacecraft into stable orbit, return in one piece, and be ready for another launch within hours. SpaceX isn't completely there yet, but they are trying to figure it out.