Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Welcomes Elon Musk ‘To the Club’ After Rocket Landing

SpaceX has been in the race toward the first successful rocket landing for some time, a race it lost just weeks ago to Blue Origin, the civilian space company run by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. The video, which SpaceX released Tuesday, shows the vertical landing from the vantage point of a helicopter hovering nearby. The company led by billionaire Elon Musk is striving for reusability to drive launch costs down and open up space to more people.

Previous attempts, all unsuccessful, were attempted on floating landing pads.

Musk has said the ability to reuse a rocket – which dramatically reduces launch cost – is something that will help revolutionize commercial space travel. According to SpaceX, the explosion was caused by a failed strut in the rocket’s upper state liquid-oxygen tank.

Yet believe it Musk must because SpaceX accomplished the rocket landing during a live webcast. Now that SpaceX has launched and landed a rocket, Musk says the company is planning to launch a rocket, land it, and launch it again “sometime next year”. Musk called the moment revolutionary, saying that it landed “dead center on the landing pad”.

The primary mission was to put 11 small satellites into low orbit for Orbcomm’s new satellite network.

Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, the top commander at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, was quoted by a news agency as saying that the returning booster “placed the exclamation mark on 2015”. “No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact”. The 11 satellites launched via Falcon 9 yesterday join an existing 31 already in orbit, including six that Falcon 9 launched in 2014.

Though many may argue this has been done before – when Blue Origin landed its rocket on November 25 – they are two separate beasts. On Twitter, Musk said the temperature changes were made to improve engine performance.

The SpaceX was able to achieved the incredible event in space history nearly a century after Wright Brothers set a plane fly.