Couple of cool developments this week. First, SpaceX has apparently engineered and produced some sort of crazy robot (being referred to as a giant roomba) called Optimus Prime that will live on the drone ship and automatically go out after a landing to secure the rocket to the ship. According to theory, that will help to eliminate some of the dangerous aspects of securing the ship and hauling it back. There aren't very good pictures out there, but this gives you the idea (more
here):
Second, they have
leased a big warehouse at Port Canaveral that they are going to use specifically to refurbish rockets, so they won't have to ship them across the country to clean them up anymore.
Pretty cool to see the effort they're now putting toward IMPROVING the recovery process rather than just landing them in the first place.
First launch of a previously-flown rocket is coming up in a week.
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