Monday, January 5, 2015

SpaceX’s Next Frontier: Landing a Rocket on Earth

Chang, Kenneth. "SpaceX’s Next Frontier: Landing a Rocket on Earth." The New York
            Times. The New York Times, 04 Jan. 2015. Web. 05 Jan. 2015.
            In this article, Kenneth Chang, wrote about the next step in space travel. He wrote about landing a rocket on Earth. This may sound like it is an easy objective, but no rocket has ever been up to space, and landed on land. All other cases of rockets returning into Earth’s atmosphere have ended with the rocket landing in the middle of the ocean, making it unable for reuse. Mr. Musk, the chief executive of the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, stated, “Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level.” In a attempt to land a rocket from space on land, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is to life off from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, and land on a landing platform, that is 300 by 170 feet. Mr. Musk predicts the chances of success is less then 50%, but they are going to continue many attempts throughout 2015.
            This is a very significant idea to humanity, as it will save a lot of money in space travel. It costs millions each year to make the rockets that go into space. If the rockets will be able to land and are reusable, fewer rockets will have to be made, therefore saving billions.
            In this very well written article, the once criticism that I have is that there were a few words that one might only know with prior space knowledge. As I did not have much prior space knowledge, I had to look up the words to understand the sentence. This however was a very well written article and I enjoyed learning about this topic.



1 comment:

  1. Harry Colvin’s review of the article “SpaceX’s Next Frontier: Landing a Rocket on Earth” contains information about a new landing strategy for rockets from the article. Harry included basic facts and statistics about the new landing platform being tested, which helped readers to picture what the article was discussing. Also, Harry included a direct quote from the article about the benefits of landing rockets on land instead of in water. Lastly, I felt that Harry expressed his concerns about the use of advanced words well. However, Harry lacked detail in his writing and was extremely brief. Also, he could have included more information about how rockets could be reused. Nonetheless, I found that Harry made the point of the article very clear and there was little confusion about the topic.

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