SpaceX Rebounds, Launching and Landing Rocket Upright

In itself the launch was significant, being the first Falcon 9 to take off since a disastrous explosion destroyed its unmanned International Space Station supply craft in June.

SpaceX commentators described the launching and return – the initial time an orbital rocket successfully reached a restricted landing on Earth – as “very exciting”.

The SpaceX rocket that landed Monday successfully launched satellites into orbit.

SpaceX made several attempts to land the rocket back on Earth safely, including two successful “soft attempts” in the water. In November, Jeff Bezos’ private spaceflight company Blue Origin announced that it had landed its rocket New Shepard post-launch.

SpaceX completed an historic vertical landing of its Falcon 9 rocket on Monday night.

Following the landing, SpaceX’s engineers began removing excess fuel and oxidizers from the rocket while preparing its transport to the company’s facilities.

A successful mission puts SpaceX back into what has been a busy operation at Cape Canaveral.

The landing leg tooling was designed by Leading Edge, Johnson said, and is its most significant contribution to SpaceX. There is no denying the fact that bringing it back and then landing it right was something that many thought was impossible.

The biggest change for this third attempt was landing the rocket on solid ground rather than on a floating platform out at sea.

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”.

SpaceX sent a Falcon rocket soaring toward orbit Monday night with 11 small satellites, its first mission since an accident last summer.

Musk and others have said that making a reusable rocket would reduce costs by a factor of a hundred – thereby making interplanetary travel possible.