Gorgeous photos from SpaceX’s historic rocket launch and landing

On Monday night, when SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket landed back on the Earth, Elon Musk thought his rocket had exploded like the last time. “Launching a rocket into space and then successfully landing it back on Earth is a historic engineering achievement for all of humanity”.

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.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has said the ability to reuse a rocket is something that will help revolutionize commercial space travel. Previously, the firm had only attempted to land two of its rockets on a drone ship in the Atlantic, but neither of the launches turned out to be a success.

“The Falcon has landed”, a SpaceX commentator said on the live webcast, as workers at its headquarters went wild, chanting “USA!”

The Hawthorne, California-based company was founded in 2002 by Musk, who also serves as chief executive of Tesla Motors Inc (TSLA.O), the electric vehicle maker. One shows the launch, as well as the descent and landing burns of the returning Falcon 9, as arcs of light.

Musk called the successful landing a “revolutionary moment” for the space industry.

SpaceX’s mandate is to ultimately make space travel more economical, both in missions to space stations as well as future tourist attractions or even space residences.

“Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon’s suborbital booster stage”.

Here’s a high resolution video of the landing. SpaceX spent months correcting the problem and improving the unmanned rocket. After the rocket’s second stage separated and continued into orbit, the much larger first stage turned around, used its thrusters to steadily slow and touch down vertically in a dramatic, pinpoint landing.

“The Falcon 9 rocket costs about $16 million to build … but the cost of the propellant, which is mostly oxygen and a gas, is only about $200,000”, Musk said. The re-ignition stage of the Merlin engine in the Stage 2 portion of the rocket was something just as important as the landing of Stage 1.