New photos reveal how absolutely filthy the exterior of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket booster gets after taking multiple trips to space. The first-stage rocket booster is a trustworthy member of SpaceX's fleet, but repeated journeys to the edge of space have left it looking a little worse for wear. When SpaceX refurbishes a rocket, it doesn't necessarily care what it looks like, as long as it is in full working order.
SpaceX's entire business model relies on the ability to reuse its rocket boosters over and over again. The first-stage booster of the Falcon 9 rocket, which is the part that is equipped with landing legs, has come a long way since the company first began testing the platform. Once a massive achievement, SpaceX now regularly launches and lands its rockets with little fanfare, and it's become so good at doing it that one of its Falcon 9 boosters recently hit the 10-launch milestone.
Photographer Trevor Mahlmann is no stranger to capturing SpaceX's high-flying hardware on film. He provides images for Ars Technica, which recently ran a piece comparing photos of the Falcon 9 core designated B1060 prior to its first launch and prior to its most recent mission. The core looks vibrant and perfect prior to its first trip to space, as you might expect, but these days it's looking more like a burnt marshmallow.
One Hot Rocket
What you see covering the spacecraft in these images is mostly soot. Launching a rocket requires a huge amount of fuel, and that fuel ultimately creates clouds of sooty smoke that cling to the rocket's exterior. It might look like the rocket has been literally burned, but that's not the case. When a Falcon 9 rocket leaves Earth, the first stage booster doesn't make it far enough into space that it has to deal with intense heat generated by impacting Earth's atmosphere at a high rate of speed, as is the case when a satellite falls back to Earth and is incinerated.
One interesting thing to note in the "after" picture is the clean lines that are traced along the sides of the rocket. SpaceX refurbishes its rockets between uses, and that means it has to check every aspect of the hardware to ensure that nothing is broken or otherwise imperfect. The stripes that have been wiped clean on the core line up with the rocket's exterior panels, suggesting that SpaceX wipes those clean in order to get a good look at how it's holding up. In this case, the rocket was deemed worthy of yet another trip into space.
Source: Trevor Mahlmann