How SpaceX lands the Falcon 9 rocket

On Monday night, local time, the upgraded 23-storey-tall rocket took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the main stage returning about 10 minutes later to a landing site about 9.65km south of the launch pad.

“Welcome back, baby!” CEO Elon Musk tweeted after the rocket touched down. This marks the third attempt of the company to vertically land a rocket, the first on land.

Last night, SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Falcon 9 rocket at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

This isn’t the first try by SpaceX, they have failed twice before when the first stage of the rocket exploded on impact.

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin company has landed a smaller, suborbital rocket in November.

Landing rockets upright is crucial to cutting the cost of space travel, since that means the rockets can be reused.

“This should, if all goes well, give us enough performance to deliver 11 satellites to orbit and bring the booster all the way back to Cape Canaveral to Landing Zone 1”, added Musk. The Falcon 9 rocket puts 11 ORBCOMM satellites into orbit as planned in SpaceX’s first mission since they had a rocket unexpectedly explode just moments into an ISS resupply mission. Welcome to the club! The rocket was carrying $110 million worth of supplies for NASA to the International Space Station. The rocket made it to the drone ship, but landed hard.

And it was the first attempt to land its Falcon 9 on an actual launchpad. Here’s hoping we all live to see Elon Musk and SpaceX reach the next space exploration milestone! Normally, expensive rockets are discarded or destroyed during re-entry, meaning the same parts need to be built from scratch for each launch.

It’s an almost-Christmas miracle: SpaceX on Monday returned the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket to Earth with a soft touchdown.

The landing leg tooling was designed by Leading Edge, Johnson said, and is its most significant contribution to SpaceX.