September 26, 2017
Cosmos Editorial
Space travel isn’t cheap. Getting a 20-tonne payload into low Earth orbit will set you back US $62 million, according to SpaceX’s current price list.
A large part of the cost goes into simply building the rocket to do the heavy lifting: at 70 metres high and weighing in at 550 tonnes, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a considerable piece of hardware that, at present, is most often only used once.
One way to bring the costs down dramatically would be to land the rocket safely after use so that it could be used again. That’s just what SpaceX has been working on in recent years, with notable success.
Along the way, as the video above shows, have been a large number of explosive failures.
