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SpaceX reusable rockets launch Elon Musk into history

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Los Angeles entrepreneur Elon Musk has so many grand plans — developing self-driving cars and the hyperloop, revolutionizing solar power and how the world gets electricity, colonizing Mars, to name a few — that he’s labeled crazy and genius in a single breath. Just two years ago, popular author-astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson teed off on Musk for “the delusion” of thinking that his company SpaceX would dominate a new space era. Tyson said instead a government program would lead the way, not SpaceX or any other private firm.

Tyson might have changed his mind after seeing what SpaceX achieved Thursday. The Hawthorne-based company launched a commercial communications satellite at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida using a first-stage Falcon 9 rocket booster that it had used in a previous launch and recovered. After Thursday’s launch, the booster — the most important and most expensive part of the rocket that sent the satellite into space — then landed on a floating platform in the Atlantic, allowing it to be used again. If such reuse becomes the norm, it could cut launch costs by at least 30 percent and possibly much more, thus making make space transportation — and space tourism — common and affordable. Reusable rockets even make Musk’s hope to develop a human colony on Mars more plausible.

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But first things first. Musk says his next goal is reuse a rocket booster, without refurbishment, within 24 hours — perhaps as soon as later this year. That would be another great feat. The native South African Stanford Ph.D. dropout, a U.S. citizen since 2002 who also founded PayPal, appears well on his way to becoming one of history’s greatest scientist-inventors.

And he’s not done yet. Not by a long shot.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

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