The folks at SpaceX are feeling good about their latest rocket launch and landing — so good that they’re making Pokémon Go jokes about it.
The Elon Musk-backed aerospace company overnight launched a rocket into orbit, thereby putting a Dragon cargo ship on its way to the International Space Station.
The Falcon 9 rocket then managed to land back on earth in Cape Canaveral, Fla. —a little bit of a twist, given that prior landings were on a drone ship. Such landings are key as “reusable” rockets are essential to reducing space-travel costs, Musk and other SpaceX executives have said.
By the end of SpaceX’s online broadcast of the whole shebang, the engineers hosting the webcast early Monday morning were in a jolly mood.
That’s when the Pokemon Go joke hit, as the broadcast suddenly showed the interface for the wildly popular mobile game, along with a cartoon version of the Dragon cargo ship.
“Is that a Dragon?” asked Tom Praderio, a SpaceX engineer.
“Oh yeah. I’m gonna get it,” said another engineer, Lauren Lyons.
You can watch that part of the video below, starting at around the 31:25 mark:
The joke didn’t go totally without a hitch, as you can hear someone on the webcast celebrating the comedic effort a tad too soon — before the video actually ends.
“That was money,” a voice says, just before the webcast wraps.
This latest SpaceX mission’s primary goal has been to deliver “critical cargo” to the ISS, as a MarketWatch report on Friday noted. That includes a docking adapter that will allow a future SpaceX Dragon carrying astronauts to dock to the ISS, as part of NASA’s commercial crew program.
The Boeing-built adapter is meant to replace one that was destroyed in a June 2015 Falcon 9 launch explosion. It should also keep NASA on track for initial test flights of new crew ferry ships in 2017 or 2018, a CBS report said.
Early Monday, Musk tweeted about the successful landing: