Jeff Bezos Tweets to Elon Musk: ‘Welcome to the Club’

Rival company Blue Origin, a space start-up founded by Amazon.com chief executive Jeff Bezos, nailed a similar return rocket landing test last month. This marks the third attempt of the company to vertically land a rocket, the first on land.

It took a bit of trial and error, but SpaceX has finally pulled it off – the Falcon 9 rocket is officially a reusable piece of space tech.

Are people on social media reading too much into a couple of tweets sent between billionaires? His last Falcon 9 rocket, carrying cargo for the International Space Station, exploded just after liftoff in June.

SpaceX says that with this technology space flight can become cheaper, as they would no longer need to build a new rocket for every launch.

SpaceX, the vaunted rocket company owned by investor and entrepreneur Elon Musk, reemerged months after a crash with its best success yet.

This week’s Falcon 9 launch, the first since a rocket explosion doomed its June launch (the Falcon 9 is unmanned), went off near-perfect, with 11 satellites launched into orbit on behalf of Orbcomm, a communications company. The latest mission was capped by delivery of all 11 satellites to orbit for customer Orbcomm. A snapped strut in the upper stage was to blame. According to Ars Technica, Elon Musk said that despite the $60 million price tag on the rocket itself, the propellant for each Falcon 9 launch costs only $200,000, a pittance in the context of space travel.

The outstanding achievement, which followed a number of troubling setbacks for the private space company earlier in the year, is a wonderful testament to the team’s skill and expertise, as well as its determination to advance its grand project to create a reusable rocket system and dramatically cut the cost of space travel.