Videos: Falcon 9 Sends Dragon to Orbit, Flight-Proven Booster Returns to Cape Canaveral
On Friday, for the first time, SpaceX launched a flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket and a previously used Dragon spacecraft, lifting off on the company’s fourth ISS resupply mission in 2017. The December 14 liftoff also marked the return of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station after 15 months of downtime following the 2016 explosion of a Falcon 9 rocket. Liftoff occurred at 15:36 UTC and Falcon 9 needed ten minutes to dispatch Dragon into orbit for a two-day rendezvous with the International Space Station while the first stage booster only needed eight minutes for its round trip, landing at the Cape’s Landing Zone 1 to become the first Falcon 9 to manage two land-based recoveries.
