SpaceX’s rocket landing triumph could make spaceflight cheaper

SpaceX said landing the rocket was a secondary priority at the Monday launch.

Monday’s launch was the first since June 28, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated just two minutes after liftoff.

The 15-story booster gently settled back to Earth, landing upright on the touchdown pad, just 10 minutes after launch. The company has been trying to land the first stage successfully to try to make space flight cheaper and more attainable to anyone interested.

The December 21 mission was the first attempt to land a first stage rocket on land after previous unsuccessful attempts to land on floating landing pads in the ocean.

SpaceX has announced that it has finally landed the first stage of the rocket successfully. Last month, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos revealed that his space company, Blue Origin, had successfully landed a test rocket at its launch site in West Texas, which it planned to use again.

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

The mission’s primary objective was the delivery of 11 satellites into a low Earth orbit constellation for ORBCOMM, a machine-to-machine and Internet of Things solutions provider. Welcome to the club!

A rocket flying toward the ground is usually a bad sign, but for aerospace company SpaceX, it was a huge success. The first attempt ended in an explosion, and the booster tipped over the second time. Monday’s launch was the first since SpaceX redesigned and upgraded the powerful rocket. “No one has ever brought an orbital class booster back intact”. The rocket made it to the drone ship, but landed hard. The 11 satellites launched via Falcon 9 yesterday join an existing 31 already in orbit, including six that Falcon 9 launched in 2014. If everything checks out, future launches by SpaceX could be the ones that kick off the reusable rocket revolution.