SpaceX: Falcon 9 rocket make historic vertical landing in Florida

Engineers successfully returned the company’s Falcon 9 rocket to Earth, landing it vertically on a landing pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida – just ten minutes after it blasted-off for its jaunt to space and back.

Monday’s event is the first launch of the Falcon 9 rocket since a failed mission to the International Space Station in June.

Founder Elon Musk has said the ability to reuse a rocket – which dramatically reduces launch cost – is something that will help revolutionize commercial space travel.

SpaceX successfully landed its powerful Falcon 9 rocket in an upright position on Monday, a historic first in the company s bid to make rockets as reusable as airplanes. The satellites will provide machine to machine communication for the Internet of Things applications on Earth.

This is the first time SpaceX has ever attempted to land a rocket on land. This mission also marks SpaceX’s return-to-flight as well as its first mission to land a first stage on land.

Following the landing, SpaceX’s engineers began removing excess fuel and oxidizers from the rocket while preparing its transport to the company’s facilities. In November, Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company Blue Origin announced that it had landed its rocket New Shepard post-launch.

The landing was greeted by wild cheering by the mission crew and has been described as a crucial way of driving down costs of space travel by using reusable rockets.

“This has been a wildly successful return to flight for SpaceX“, said one SpaceX launch commentator.

Following the failure in June, SpaceX has upgraded Falcon 9’s design and rearranged it for a vertical landing on the ground instead of landing on the sea.

The launch had been delayed several times so SpaceX employees could fix glitches in the rocket’s redesign, which was meant to give it more power.