SpaceX completes first ever vertical landing

SpaceX scientists seem to be on the cloud nine. Aiming for a floating landing pad in the ocean, one attempt resulted in an explosion and the other just didn’t quite make it.

Landing a booster isn’t just a fancy trick for billionaire Mr. Musk.

The full 45-minute webcast of the rocket launch and landing can be viewed here.

According to NBC News, SpaceX launched its rocket Monday from the Cape Canaveral base in Florida.

Across the country, SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success.

The Falcon 9 booster seconds after landing at Cape Canaveral. Here’s a video featuring SpaceX hosts.

The grid fins, located near the top of the rocket help steer it. As it nears the landing site, engineers light the engines once more to help guide it, while the landing legs are deployed.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company has landed a smaller, suborbital rocket in November. A month ago, Amazon‘s Blue Origins New Shepherd spacecraft also performed such a feat.

Meanwhile, ORBCOMM said in a statement that all 11 satellites were put in their respective orbit.

The touchdown was a secondary objective for SpaceX. All the satellites are now successfully orbiting the planet.

He said, the landed booster “placed the exclamation mark on 2015”. The stable surface was marked by a giant X. The reinforced concrete provides a stable surface, unlike the barges used for the initial attempts, primarily for increased safety. Blue Origin recently became the first to land a rocket after sending it to space, but SpaceX’s rocket went about twice as high and actually completed a successful, unrelated satellite mission before testing its landing capabilities. A snapped strut was to blame – but the company spent months correcting the problem. If everything checks out, future launches by SpaceX could be the ones that kick off the reusable rocket revolution. It aims to resume supply missions to the space station in February.

Safely landing these rockets can save companies a lot of money, said Carissa Christensen, managing partner at the consulting firm Tauri Group.