LOS ANGELES – California space-launch entrepreneur Elon Musk said Thursday his company will try to develop an orbital booster system with components capable of flying back to Earth for reuse.
Both of the rocket’s stages would return to the launch site and touch down vertically, under rocket power, on landing gear after delivering a spacecraft to orbit, Musk said in a webcast speech to the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. A company animation also showed a capsule landing in the same way.
Musk, founder of Hawthorne, Calif.-based Space Exploration Technologies, known as SpaceX, said the complexities of the engineering have canceled previous efforts by others.
“I wasn’t sure it could be solved, for a while, but then I think just relatively recently — probably in the last 12 months or so — I’ve come to the conclusion that it can be solved and I think SpaceX is going to try to do
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