The majority of our minds can't really understand the work behind a rocket landing successfully, but it's pretty cool, I guess.
Elon Musk's SpaceX rocket Falcon 9 has recently made a perfect landing at Kennedy Space Center after delivering food and other goods for the six astronauts on board the International Space Station, the Daily Mail reports.
In all honesty the clip of the rocket landing just looks like someone's reversed a clip of a rocket taking off, but hey ho. The footage shows the ship descending through the clouds to land bang in the centre of the launch pad where astronauts flew to the moon from 48 years ago.
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The endeavour was the first SpaceX mission to take off from the pad, and the first since last September. It originally took off at 9:38am on Sunday, after a technical error meant it couldn't launch on the originally planned day on Saturday.
Credit: SpaceX
This is the third time a SpaceX rocket has successfully landed on solid land, with five other successful landings having been made on sea-based platforms. SpaceX is aiming to make this a regular thing in order to stop using single-use rockets.
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All of this bodes well for Musk, who plans to be the first man to send people to Mars, as early as 2022.
Last year the entrepreneur basically said that people would have to be willing to die for him in order to make the mission a success, alluding to the possible death toll, saying: "The risk of fatality will be high," during his keynote speech in front of an audience in Guadalajara, Mexico, in September.
"There's no way around it," he said. "If that's okay, you're a candidate for going. The probability of death is quite high on the first mission."
Basically, there are schools of thought, which I've put into a flow chart:
However, in order to make the risk of death while on the way to Mars seem more appealing, Elon opened his speech by addressing the risk of death while staying on earth.
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"I don't have an immediate doomsday prophecy," the happy-go-lucky geezer stated. "One path is to stay on Earth forever, and there will be some extinction event. The alternative is to become a multi-planetary species, which I hope you will agree is the right way to go." He's basically trying to entice people into having a bit more excitement and dare in the lives as whatever they do, they die. Nice!
He went on to claim that sending someone to the red planet will cost around $10billion, or, chump change, as he calls it.
Musk plans to colonise the planet, as he believes that is the only option unless we want to "stay on Earth forever and then there will be an inevitable extinction event."
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Eventually, putting to bed any suggestions that he should be the one to take on the life threatening mission, he said that he'd have to leave his companies in capable hands.
Featured Image Credit: SpaceX