Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, is on cloud nine after his company’s Dragon spacecraft successfully splashed down in the Pacific Ocean late Thursday morning.
“This has been a fantastic day,” said Musk during a press debriefing held a few hours after the landing. “I’d like to thank NASA and the whole SpaceX team for doing an amazing job. This really couldn’t have gone better. I’m just overwhelmed with joy.”
Musk admitted that he spent most of the mission thinking about what could go wrong with the flight.
“When you’ve been deeply involved in the design of a complex machine, when you see it operate, you know all the things that can go wrong,” said Musk. “When I was looking at the rocket and the spacecraft, I was thinking about the thousands of ways it could fail. This may sound sort of odd, but when you see it actually work you’re sort of surprised.
“Which is not to say that we didn’t expect it work,” added Musk, “you can just see see so many ways it can fail and then you’re like, ‘wow, it didn’t fail.’”
The Dragon’s success is SpaceX’s gain. Alan Lindenmoyer, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew & Cargo Program, was gushing with optimism about SpaceX’s future role in delivering cargo to the International Space Station.
SEE ALSO: Confirmed: SpaceX Dragon Ferried ‘Scotty’s’ Remains Into Space“We’ve been waiting for this day, and it’s a certainly been a tremendous day,” said Lindenmoyer during the debriefing. “We’re hoping to move forward now to routine regular cargo shipments. I don’t think it’s going to take us very long to make the formal determination that this was a very successful mission and that [SpaceX] is well on their way to start delivering regular services.”
Musk did, however, concede that the Dragon encountered at least one challenge while flying high above the Earth: a faulty laser-based guidance system created a minor hiccup during the birthing process. However, astronauts on board the ISS were able to correct the problem after the craft hooked up to the space station.
“On approach, we had slight trouble with LIDARs — laser-based radar,” said Musk. “It was a little flaky coming in, but we made adjustments while [Dragon] was on the ISS and eliminated that as a concern in the future.”
During the re-entry, Musk sat at SpaceX mission control in California, anxiously watching data sent from the Dragon tear across his monitors. However, he knew that if something went wrong at that point, there was very little he could do about it. He didn’t relax until he saw the main parachutes deploy, to him an indication that everything would be fine.
Musk called the mission a “grand slam” overall, adding that he hoped it would inspire young people to join the space industry.
“I hope that today’s events were really inspiring, and I encourage people to go into the space industry,” said Musk. “I think we’re at the dawn of a new era in space travel where there’s going to be a huge opportunity and lots of things happening.”
Up next for Musk?
“We’ll continue to upgrade the technology and push the frontier of space exploration,” he said, referring to hauling more than just cargo to the International Space Station, but launching astronauts and satellites into space as well.
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