SES ready to “reuse” SpaceX rocket
June 19, 2015
SpaceX, founded by PayPal billionaire Elon Musk, is working hard to recover and reuse its Falcon-9 rocket launchers. It has had two ‘near misses’ when the returning rocket almost made it to the floating recovery landing stage. But ‘almost’ is not good enough.
But besides Mr Musk there’s at least one other key individual who wants to see SpaceX successfully bring a rocket back to Earth, and that’s SES’s CTO Martin Halliwell. Halliwell told an audience of City analysts and investors on June 17th that SES has offered to be a client when one of the rockets does make a successful landing.
SES has benefitted in the past by being a debut client for one of its satellites atop a Falcon-9 rocket. It received a discount price for the launch of SES-8 for example. Now SES is saying that it would be happy – for the right price – to see a reused and refurbished Falcon-9 rocket take one of its precious satellites into orbit.
“Our launch vehicle for SES-9 will be a recoverable vehicle,” Halliwell told analysts. “We believe they will be able to recover it on this mission. We actually asked them: If we do recover it, can we use it again and get a good price discount? We’re still in discussions.”
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