One of the design tenets of Elon Musk’s SpaceX program has been its drive to reduce the cost of boosting cargo (and humans) into orbit by reusing both design IP and rocket boosters. The company has been testing rockets that could land safely after launching cargo payloads at escape velocity, and company founder and CEO Elon Musk unveiled a key part of that plan over the weekend. In the future, SpaceX intends to deploy autonomous seagoing landing pad “drones” to function as mobile rocket platforms.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
