Watch SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Rocket Successfully Land After Launching Into Space

Elon Musk confirmed through video that the Falcon 9 Rocket has, for the first time, successfully re-landed on earth after its initial launch into space. 

Elon Musk’s Space X Falcon 9 launch, re-entry and successful landing will not only be a memorable footnote in the history of space travel but is a major milestone years in the making. According to Elon Musk himself (and based off several witnesses in the Space X program) SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed fully upright on solid earth at Cape Canaveral, Florida earlier this Monday night.

Fortunately for us, the entire webcast was streamed live and is available for everyone to see. In addition, there are a myriad of videos popping up all over social media with first-hand witnesses posting up their videos.

In particular is a beautiful time lapse photo of both the launch and re-entry of SpaceX’s Falcon9 landing tweeted and shared by Elon Musk himself.

"With this mission, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will deliver 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit for ORBCOMM, a leading global provider of Machine-to-Machine communication and Internet of Things solutions. The ORBCOMM launch is targeted for an evening launch from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Fla. If all goes as planned, the 11 satellites will be deployed approximately 20 minutes after liftoff, completing a 17-satellite, low Earth orbit constellation for ORBCOMM. This mission also marks SpaceX’s return-to-flight as well as its first attempt to land a first stage on land. The landing of the first stage is a secondary test objective."

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Being able to successfully land a rocket back on planet Earth, in layman’s terms, is seen the holy grail of making space travel both low-cost and highly reliable in the future. The idea to reuse a rocket for space has been in existence since the 1960’s but a succesful relanding of said rocket has been the issue all along.

Space X has tried landing their Falcon 9 rocket twice before this. Once back in January and again in April with the rockets falling over and exploding both times.

Since those launches, Falcon 9 has been retrofitted to have a modified structure and an updated engine that provideded more thrust upon landing. In addition, SpaceX decided to land back on solid ground rather than a floating structure in the middle of the ocean.

Next: Elon Musk Officially Launches Its 762 HP Tesla Model X

To give you an idea how beneficial a reliable relanding procedure would be, according to Musk, it costs roughly $16 million to build and ready the rocket but only $200,000 to fuel. With some simple maths and ignoring such important tasks as maintenance and overhead, you could theoretically re-launch a rocket 80 more times rather than using that money to rebuild a whole new rocket.