Days ago, the personal space company, spaceX, published their new spacecraft, the Dragon spacecraft version 2. Elon Musk, the founder of spaceX, said that this new spacecraft "allows rapid reusability of the spacecraft". Just by refilling the fuel, you can make it fly again.The new spacecraft can hold seven people and can soft land anywhere in the world accurately. The heat shield is improved ,compared with the Dragon V1, to protect the passengers during the process of reentering the atmosphere. The spacecraft can dock with the ISS without help of Canada arm, which is another different part from the version 1.The spacecraft also uses the first 3D-printed engine in the world and is going to fly in 2017.
In my opinion, this is a revolution in the area of space explore. Launching something into space was always expensive. The four failures in the expensive N-1 rocket force Russian to give up their moon-landing plan and the Americans design the unreliable space shuttle for getting reusability and save money. Of cause reusability is not a new word in the space area, we already have space shuttle, which only cost a fuel tank for each flight and the rest of space shuttle can be reused again. However, the space shuttle is not economic enough because each time people have to spend lots of money on fixing it. Meanwhile it is not safe enough since it have to land in an accurate process and it does not have launch escape system which make the passengers have little change to survive in the case like The Challenger Failure. Space shuttle is a compromise to the fact that the tradition rocket cannot be used again and it is not perfect and not what human looking for exactly.
But the spaceX makes the rocket can be reused. The First stage and Second stage of Falcon 9 rocket are designed to be able to soft landing on Earth. This can make the launching price fall to one ten of the current one (though the price of Falcon 9 has been much lower than other rocket). Weeks ago, the first stage soft landing experiment on the sea succeeded but unfortunately the rocket was destroy by the wave latter. Now we the human are going to have a reusable, safe spacecraft. It can be imagined that dozens of years latter, some ordinary citizens can go to space just like taking a plane.
PS: some people worry that soft landing ability will cost more fuel to launch a rocket but this is not true. In fact you have to prepare fuel that is able to accelerate 9000m/s to launch something in to Earth Low Orbit. But with the help of air drag, it costs only fuel for accelerating hundreds of meter per second to soft landing. And it even cost less when you are accelerating an empty and light tank(used rocket) than when you are accelerating filled with fuel and cargo. And more importantly, fuel like kerosene are much cheaper than rocket structure like engines and tanks.
http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/29/this-is-spacexs-first-ever-manned-spacecraft-the-dragon-v2/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DYQmvfThnA
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