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Lunar Launch Boosts SpaceX Into New Sphere of Business

This article is more than 5 years old.

SpaceX

SpaceX's successful launch of a company's lunar lander today (Feb. 21) is one small step on a long journey that could one day, see people or interplanetary robot missions follow.

Amid the excitement of Israel's SpaceIL -- a former Google Lunar XPRIZE competitor -- sending their Beresheet lander on a two-month journey to the moon, in the background SpaceX is working on an ambitious tourist mission that if all goes well, will circle the moon sometime in the coming years (once a launch date is set).

SpaceX launched a few payloads on its Falcon 9 rocket tonight from Cape Canaveral at 8:45 p.m. EST, lighting up the surroundings. Its first-stage rocket successfully touching down on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You minutes after launch. (It was the booster's third launch and landing.)

But it was Beresheet that caught the most media attention. It's an interesting situation because lunar missions are something that SpaceX wants to target in the coming years.

Last September, the company announced a plan to send wealthy people around the moon; the first one revealed was Japanese fashion mogul Yusaku Maezawa. He plans to help recruit a crew of artists, musicians and designers to accompany him.

To get there, SpaceX plans to use its conceptual BFR rocket -- the larger successor to the Falcon Heavy rocket whose demonstration flight in 2018 featured a mannequin "driving" a red Tesla Roadster.

These bigger rockets position SpaceX to take on even heavier payloads than its workhorse Falcon 9, which (for example) is used for International Space Station missions and in December, launched SpaceX's first military payload into space. (Some analysts note, however, the Falcon Heavy may be a dead end -- a placeholder to fulfill Air Force contracts until BFR is operational.)

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The Falcon Heavy opens up all sorts of new markets for SpaceX beyond taking the ultra-rich into lunar orbit. Heavier rockets are able to take on hefty military satellites, or they can launch probes to other planets since the rockets carry more fuel. United Launch Alliance (ULA) is a competitor to SpaceX in the military launch business and uses its Atlas V rocket not only for reconnaissance launches, but also for NASA deeper-space missions such as asteroid probe OSIRIS-REx (Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification, Security-Regolith Explorer), or the stationary Mars InSight lander that just deployed its seismometer on the Red Planet.

The Beresheet mission is also a coup for Israel, which is now on track to be the fourth country to land something on the moon after the Soviet Union, the United States and India. Incredibly, the lander cost only $100 million and was put together with only 30 engineers and a few volunteers.

While Beresheet received the most media coverage tonight, the other missions on board fall squarely in line with SpaceX's desire to step up its military customer base and continue serving telecommunications companies.

The main payload was a communications satellite from Indonesia, called PSN-6 (Nusantara Satu) by PT Pasifik Satelit Nusantara. A smaller, secondary payload was the S5, an experimental military satellite for the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory. (In fact, the S5 mission design called for it to hitch a ride on the PSN-6 before separating.) S5 is part of a test space situational awareness network using small satellites, instead of the traditional large ones the military tends to use.