Elon Musk Celebrates SpaceX Rocket Launch & Landing

The mission’s primary objective was commercial: the company had been commissioned to launch satellites for the New Jersey-based communications company OrbComm.

Last April, the United Launch Alliance unveiled Vulcan, a next-generation rocket that sheds its main engines – the most expensive part of a first stage – after they shut down.

U.S. company SpaceX has successfully landed an unmanned rocket upright, after sending 11 satellites into orbit. The footage of the rocket’s landing is all over the internet, and it brought Elon Musk and company an unexpected victory.

On that occasion an unmanned Falcon-9 broke apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with debris tumbling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean.

SpaceXPicture of SpaceX’s rocket seconds before touch down.

“Falcon 9 rockets are already the cheapest in the industry”.

Video images on SpaceX’s webcast showed the first stage of the rocket touching down at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

For decades, Cape Canaveral served as the iconic launch site for countless missions to space, and now thanks to SpaceX, the legendary facility has also seen a rocket landing shortly after launching a payload into space.

“It’s exciting. We do a lot of work for a lot of companies”, Johnson said. Along with Boeing, SpaceX now is under contract by NASA to launch astronauts to the International Space Station.

Minutes after blast-off, the Falcon 9’s first-stage rocket separated from its upper-stage booster, which continued on into orbit to release ORBCOMM’s satellites about 800 km above the Earth. After Musk gave a backward compliment to Bezos following the landing of New Shepard, Bezos returned the sentiment on Monday.

“It really felt like it was right on top of us”, Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, said during a telephone news conference after the landing, according to the New York Times.

It costs about the same to build a jumbo jet as it costs to build one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets, and if we could re-use rockets the way we re-use aircraft, it would reduce spaceflight costs by more than a factor of 100.

Across the country, SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success.

Six months after one of its rockets exploded after launch, privately-owned SpaceX resumed operations Monday with a dramatic nighttime launch and a historic landing of its first-stage booster. But the prospect of viable, low-cost, private sector space travel suddenly seems a little less sci-fi.

It’s something never accomplished during a space mission.