SpaceX rocket launches 6 months after accident, safely lands

A Wichita company had a hand in the successful landing of SpaceX’s 15-story Falcon rocket booster Monday night in Cape Canaveral, Fla.

“Thus has been a wildly successful return to flight for SpaceX”, one launch commentator at the company reportedly said.

The launch’s payload, 11 ORBCOMM satellites destined to join others in the communications company’s network, was also successfully deployed with no problems.

Why a reusable rocket matters SpaceX The process of landing a reusable rocket is shown in this diagram from SpaceX. Fully reuseable rockets could greatly reduce the cost of getting to orbit, making the expansion of humanity into space much easier.

The launch had been delayed several times so SpaceX employees could fix glitches in the rocket’s redesign, which was meant to give it more power.

The launch was the first for SpaceX since June, when a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a Dragon capsule loaded with 4,300 pounds of supplies for the International Space Station exploded shortly after takeoff.

For the first time anywhere, a rocket was launched but then returned and landed vertically on the pad.

Just six months ago, a devastating explosion-caused by a faulty strut-destroyed the Falcon 9 about two minutes after launch, along with hundreds of millions of dollars in cargo and equipment bound for the ISS.

The top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig.

“It’s a revolutionary moment”, Musk said, according to NBC News, after SpaceX landed its rocket Monday night. When Blue Origin became the first company to achieve a vertical landing of a rocket that had traveled into outer space last month, Musk tweeted his own congrats to Bezos.

Watch the replay of the launch and landing at www.spacex.com and read Elon Musk’s background and thoughts on the mission. The Blue Origin rocket that landed upright in November made a much shorter sub-orbital flight.

But SpaceX had to reach low orbit – which begins about 100 miles above Earth – and its rocket needed to travel at an angle and at a speed of more than 17,000 mph in order to put the spacecraft into orbit.

Musk said it will take a few more years to iron everything out, for actual reusability of his rockets.