SpaceX Falcon rocket blasts off and returns to safe landing

The crowd at SpaceX headquarters went insane as the rocket touched down.

SpaceX successfully landed the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket at a landing pad in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

These improvements will allow Falcon 9 first stages to be landed even after launches to geostationary rather than low-earth orbits.

SpaceX sent its Falcon 9 soaring into space on Monday night, with the first stage returning to land vertically at Cape Canaveral just 10 minutes after it had blasted off.

The Hawthorne, California-based company was founded in 2002 by Musk, who also serves as chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc., the electric vehicle maker.

“Welcome back, baby!”, Musk said in a celebratory tweet.

“It’s a revolutionary moment”, Musk later told reporters.

But the SpaceX feat, which the company had characterised before launch as a “secondary test objective”, was achieved during an actual commercial mission. The rocket’s massive first stage executed a series of maneuvers that brought it back to Cape Canaveral in Florida. Its plan was originally for a vertical rocket landing on an autonomous drone spaceport in the ocean, but those landing attempts did not succeed.

“I can’t quite believe it”, he said.

Monday’s launch was delayed one day, a calculated move to ensure a safe landing. Gen. Wayne Monteith, noted that the returning booster “placed the exclamation mark on 2015”.

Weather and other delays kept its comeback flight grounded this weekend, but SpaceX launched from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Air Force Station without a hitch on Monday evening.

The landing was extremely hard, one SpaceX spokesman said during the live broadcast of the mission.

About 3 minutes after liftoff and about 60 miles altitude, the spent first stage separated from the second stage which continued to orbit with the Orbcomm satellites. The celebration that broke out after the landing at SpaceX is saying all. “We made history today”. Earlier in November, Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company Blue Origin landed its rocket New Shepard after it travelled into the space. That rocket, though, had been used for a suborbital flight.