SpaceX rocket makes historic landing

Last night, for the first time, a rocket delivered its payload to orbit and then made a landing back where it came from without falling into the ocean or exploding.

Few minutes later, the vehicle carrying the satellites separated from the rocket, and a backburn began on the Falcon 9 to bring it back toward Earth.

Musk has previously said he believes reusing rockets – which cost as much as a commercial airplane – could reduce the cost of access to space by a factor of one hundred.

Landing a booster isn’t just a fancy trick for billionaire Mr. Musk. SpaceX landed a rocket named Grasshopper vertically two years ago, but that one didn’t go into space. That effort was thwarted when the fins meant to guide the rocket’s descent stopped working, and it crashed into the drone ship it was meant to land on.

After Monday’s landing, SpaceX announced it had more rockets in development that are created to pull off the same maneuver.

Musk noted how the Falcon 9’s launch was not just a practice flight, but part of a mission laid out by his company, adding: “We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites”. All the satellites are now successfully orbiting the planet.

Cheers also rang out at Kennedy Space Center, where hundreds of people associated with Orbcomm Inc., whose 11 satellites were on top of the rocket’s upper stage and still headed toward space, were gathered to watch. When the booster landed, he tweeted, “Bullseye“.

“Welcome back, baby!”, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted shortly after touchdown. The stable surface was marked by a giant X. Gen. Wayne Monteith, noted that the returning booster “placed the exclamation mark on 2015”.

Musk started SpaceX in 2003 with the ambition of colonizing Mars, something he feels is necessary to prolong humanity’s existence amid a likely global calamity.

SpaceX successfully landed its powerful Falcon 9 rocket on Monday for the first time, a major milestone in the drive to cut costs and waste by making rockets as reusable as airplanes.

“This was a critical step along the way to being able to establish a city on Mars”, he said.