SpaceX: CATS with FRIKKIN' LASERS to blast off to space station

Easy to go up, harder to come down in one piece

The launch is scheduled for 0620 EST (1120 UTC) on Tuesday and, provided all goes to plan, the payload will spend two days circling the Earth to get into position before being caught by the station's robot arm and locked onto the ISS. So far the weather forecast looks OK, with a 40 per cent chance of cloud heavy enough to postpone the launch to Wednesday.

Minutes after lift-off, SpaceX will try to safely return the first stage of the reusable Falcon rocket back to Earth: it hopes to land the engine vertically on a sea barge, and return it to the workshops. The specially equipped rocket has landing lags and steerable wings to make the descent while SpaceX's landing barge gets into position.

Drone spaceport ship heads to its hold position in the Atlantic to prepare for a rocket landing pic.twitter.com/kXYHGVKTfE

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 5, 2015

Sources familiar with the matter put the odds of a successful landing no better than 50/50, with even less chance of the rocket being successfully secured and transported back to land.

Once back in the SpaceX workshop, the entire rocket structure will be taken apart and tested for wear and tear, including ultrasonic and chemical analysis. It will then be put back together and fired in three static tests.

The company wants to find out if the expensive first stage can be reused safely. If so, it could slash the cost of getting payloads into orbit. But parts may need to be replaced or redesigned before that happens, since pushing out that kind of thrust can be very tough on hardware. Getting the rocket back in one piece will be a major step forward.

Meanwhile, good and bad news back on Earth

SpaceX's Musketeers heard good news on Monday when the US public-spending watchdog the General Accounting Office (GAO) overruled objections to SpaceX and Boeing getting a joint contract, and funding, from NASA to operate a space taxi service to the ISS.

In September NASA announced that it had signed up the two companies in a $6.8bn deal to deliver people up to the ISS. The losing contestant, Sierra Nevada Corporation, promptly called foul on the process.

Sierra offered to take astronauts up on its Dream Chaser spacecraft for $2.55bn, compared to bids of $3.01bn from Boeing for its CST-100 transporter and $1.75bn from SpaceX for its Dragon capsule.

By awarding Boeing a contract, Sierra said the agency was breaking its own bidding rules. It also said that SpaceX's price was unrealistically low and the company's finances needed probing.

The GAO investigated the complaints, and has given the deal the green light. Boeing was more expensive, it found, but scored highest on technical approach, management approach, and past performance, while SpaceX's bid looks realistic, it said.

The only sour note of the last few days has come for Musk himself, as on New Year's Eve he filed for a divorce from his British wife Talulah Riley.

The couple married in 2010 before divorcing two years later, but reconciled and remarried in 2013. That partnership barely lasted a year however, and now the couple has had a reportedly amicable split with Riley receiving $16m in cash and stocks as a settlement. ®