{"id":19067,"date":"2017-02-19T17:28:06","date_gmt":"2017-02-19T09:28:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp-productionenv-bjg9h2g2bgg5b8aa.southeastasia-01.azurewebsites.net\/news\/spacex-makes-its-first-liftoff-from-nasas-historic-moon-pad-and-then-lands-falcon-9-booster\/"},"modified":"2017-02-19T17:28:06","modified_gmt":"2017-02-19T09:28:06","slug":"spacex-makes-its-first-liftoff-from-nasas-historic-moon-pad-and-then-lands-falcon-9-booster","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/news\/spacex-makes-its-first-liftoff-from-nasas-historic-moon-pad-and-then-lands-falcon-9-booster\/","title":{"rendered":"SpaceX makes its first liftoff from NASA\u2019s historic moon pad \u2013 and then lands Falcon 9 booster"},"content":{"rendered":"
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SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 rocket rises from Launch Complex 39A. (NASA via YouTube)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

SpaceX sent a rocket rising from NASA\u2019s historic Launch Complex 39A today for the first time since the space shuttle fleet retired, marking a new chapter for a pad that served as the springboard for Apollo moon missions.<\/p>\n

The Falcon 9 rocket sent a robotic Dragon capsule toward the International Space Station with almost 5,500 pounds of supplies and experiments, under the terms of SpaceX\u2019s multimillion-dollar contract with NASA.<\/p>\n

As a bonus, the rocket\u2019s first-stage booster flew itself back to a perfect touchdown at SpaceX\u2019s Landing Zone 1, not far from the Kennedy Space Center launch site in Florida. That\u2019s part of SpaceX\u2019s plan for reusing hardware and driving down the cost of space launches even further.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s launch marked the first-ever commercial mission to take off from Pad 39, where most of the Apollo missions began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Lots of other rockets have lifted off from pads at nearby Cape Canaveral Air Force Station since the last shuttle mission in 2011, but not from the space center itself.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=VnM2uGeZEFs<\/p>\n

This was the second attempt to get the historic mission off the ground.<\/p>\n

Saturday\u2019s countdown got to the T-minus-13 seconds before it was called off. The launch team was trying to resolve a concern about the thrust vector control system for the Falcon 9\u2019s second-stage rocket engine, and in the end, SpaceX went with a one-day postponement to give the team more time.<\/p>\n

In a series of tweets, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said nagging worries about the control system led him to postpone Saturday\u2019s launch even though computers were giving the go-ahead.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this is the only issue, flight would be fine, but need to make sure that it isn\u2019t symptomatic of a more significant upstream root cause,\u201d Musk wrote. He said it wasn\u2019t worth \u201crolling the dice\u201d on Saturday.<\/p>\n

The issue was resolved overnight, and no further worries arose today. Musk\u2019s tweets were far more upbeat:<\/p>\n