SpaceX launches rocket 6 months after accident

Cheers and a sonic boom signaled the mission was a success!

On Thursday, with the rocket vertical on the Florida launch pad, Musk tweeted that the liquid-oxygen fuel was “presenting some challenges”.

“I think this is a critical step along the way towards being able to establish a city on Mars”, he said on a call with reporters Monday night. Gen. Wayne Monteith said in a statement.

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”.

“The Falcon has landed”, a commentator said above the screams and cheers of people gathered at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Their goal is to recycle the first stage, including its expensive engines, so it can be used repeatedly, lowering the cost of space travel.

But not all their launches have been so successful.

It was the landing, however, that received most of the attention and made history.

The accomplishment was hailed as landmark towards reusing rockets.

The touchdown was a secondary objective for SpaceX. The first was hoisting the satellites for OrbComm, a New Jersey-based communication company. All 11 were successfully deployed.

Still, ORBCOMM CEO Marc Eisenberg seemed to celebrate both the launch of his satellites and the booster landing via Twitter Monday night. It landed at Landing Zone 1, a former launch complex for Atlas intercontinental ballistic missiles that SpaceX leased. The stable surface was marked by a giant X.

Though SpaceX has been trying a while longer, the Falcon 9 landing is the second landing this year of a reusable rocket – following Blue Origin’s successful launch and landing of its own rocket.

SpaceX also plans on sending astronauts to the International Space Station as early as 2017.

Enabling rockets to land, be refurbished and re-flown, would slash the cost of launches by a factor of a hundred, Musk predicts. We look forward to seeing SpaceX make a full trip all the way to the ISS again and stick that landing on their sea barge.

SpaceX had attempted the landing on a drone ship several times before but never managed to successfully land the craft.