Florida: SpaceX sent a Falcon rocket soaring toward orbit Monday night with 11 small satellites, its first mission since an accident last summer.
Then in an even more astounding feat, it landed the 15-story leftover booster back on Earth safely.
It was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and represented a tremendous success for SpaceX.
The company led by billionaire Elon Musk is striving for reusability to drive launch costs down and open up space to more people.
"Welcome back, baby!" Musk tweeted after touchdown.
11 satellites deployed to target orbit and Falcon has landed back at Cape Canaveral. Headed to LZ-1. Welcome back, baby!— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015
The private company SpaceX achieved this incredible milestone, according to a New York Times blogger. Here's how SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket delivered 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit.
"It's a revolutionary moment," Musk later told reporters. "No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact."
What's significant is that this was a useful mission, Musk noted, not merely a practice flight. "We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites," he said.
SpaceX employees broke into cheers and chants, some of them jumping up and down, following the smooth touchdown nine minutes after liftoff.
Previous landing attempts ended in fiery blasts, but those aimed for an ocean platform.
Musk said he ran outside and heard the sonic boom of the returning booster just as it landed -- he assumed it had exploded. He learned the happy truth when he went back into Launch Control and saw video of the standing rocket.
"I can't quite believe it," he said. "It's quite shocking."
Musk said the landing appeared close to perfect and the company "could not have asked for a better mission or a better day."
There and back again pic.twitter.com/Ll7wg2hL1G— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015
The top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, noted that the returning booster "placed the exclamation mark on 2015."
"This was a first for us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and I can't even begin to describe the excitement the team feels right now having been a part of this historic first-stage rocket landing," Monteith said in a statement.
Across the country, SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success.
Cheers
They cheered at full throttle when the first stage separated cleanly two minutes into flight and reoriented itself for an unprecedented return to Cape Canaveral.
Then the roar became deafening, as TV cameras showed the first-stage booster landing on extended legs at its new, dedicated landing zone. SpaceX commentators called it "incredibly exciting" and were visibly moved by the feat.
"This has been a wildly successful return to flight for SpaceX," said one SpaceX launch commentator. "We made history today."
Blue Origin, another billionaire's rocket company, successfully landed a booster last month in West Texas. That rocket, though, had been used for a suborbital flight. The SpaceX booster was more powerful and flying faster in order to put satellites into orbit.
The touchdown was a secondary objective for SpaceX. The first was hoisting the satellites for OrbComm, a New Jersey-based communication company. All 11 were successfully deployed.
OrbComm chief executive officer Marc Eisenberg seemed just as excited about the booster landing as his satellites reaching orbit.
Bullseye
"Here she comes back," Eisenberg said via Twitter, sharing a photo of the returning booster. Then: "Bullseye."
The booster-landing zone, a former Atlas missile-launching site, is about six miles from the launch pad. SpaceX is leasing the touchdown area - marked by a giant X - from the Air Force.
The reinforced concrete provides a stable surface, unlike the barges used for the initial attempts, primarily for increased safety.
On its previous flight back in June, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket failed shortly after liftoff, destroying a supply ship intended for the International Space Station. A snapped strut in the upper stage was to blame.
SpaceX spent months correcting the problem and improving the unmanned rocket. It hopes to resume supply runs for NASA in February.
Tesla man
Musk, who also runs the Tesla electric car company, said he can drastically reduce launch costs by reusing rocket parts.
Three tries at vertical landings of the first-stage boosters earlier this year failed -- in each case, the segment aimed for a modified barge off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. This time, Musk opted for a true terrestrial landing.
Musk said it will take a few more years to iron everything out, for actual reusability of his rockets.
In the meantime, he's working to transform the SpaceX Dragon capsules from cargo ships into real spaceships for crews traveling to and from the orbiting station.
His ultimate goal, for human missions, is Mars.
"This was a critical step along the way to being able to establish a city on Mars," he said. "That's what all this is about."
Space history
Here's a blog post from New York Times' Phil Plait.
The SpaceX feat made space history. For the first time the first stage of a rocket came back from helping boost a payload to orbit and landed vertically back at the launch site.
I watched this on the SpaceX live feed, and my heart was pounding like a tympani (hearing hundreds of SpaceX employees cheering wildly only added to the suspense). By landing the first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket successfully, SpaceX can refurbish it and prepare it for another launch, saving a lot of money on launch costs.
One of the major goals CEO Elon Musk had for SpaceX was to lower launch costs, making it easier to get into space. Today, that goal was achieved. Even sweeter: This was the first Falcon 9 flight after one in June which failed catastrophically, with the entire payload (supplies for the space station) lost.
Elon Musk
Delay
OK, let me back up a bit. Tonight's launch had the primary goal of placing 11 ORBCOMM satellites into orbit.
The launch was originally set for December 20, but Musk delayed it a day because the weather looked more favorable tonight to re-land the booster.
Liftoff was right on time. The first stage burn went nominally, and separated cleanly from the upper stage.
While the upper stage continues on to carry the satellites into orbit, the first stage --which saved a little bit of fuel from the launch -- flipped around and performed a burn to slow down.
Without the upper stage, and minus most of the fuel it had at liftoff, it weighed only a fraction of its launch weight, so it didn't take nearly as much fuel to slow down and reverse course to head back to Cape Canaveral.
Cold jets oriented it correctly, and the engine reignited to begin to slow its descent.
Four huge landing struts deployed, then, 9 minutes and 44 seconds later, the moment of truth: It set down safely at Landing Zone 1, the landing pad that was once a launch site of its own in Florida.
Minutes later, the 11 ORBCOMM satellites were successfully deployed into orbit, and both the primary and secondary goals of the launch were achieved --a complete success.
Incidentally, the second stage saved a bit of fuel as well.
It was set to perform a burn to de-orbit itself, and will burn up over the Indian Ocean to prevent it from becoming just another piece of space junk to deal with in orbit.
SpaceX has been testing vertical landings for several years time with its Grasshopper rocket series, which reached a maximum height of about a kilometer (0.6 miles) off the ground.
Then, in November 2015, Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin rocket company successfully sent its New Shepard rocket into space (past the agreed-upon 100-km-high definition of space) and landed it again vertically back at the launch site, the first time that had ever been done.
Tonight, after the SpaceX booster landed again at the Cape, Bezos tweeted: That's nice, but also a little unfair. He specifically called the booster "suborbital", equating it to the New Shepard.
Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 22, 2015
However what SpaceX did was far more technically difficult. The New Shepard went straight up and down, with no sideways velocity.
The Falcon 9 first stage was moving eastward very rapidly, about 6,000 kph (3,600 mph). It had to slow, come back west, and then land.
And it also successfully boosted the second stage with the payload of 11 satellites as well.
What Blue Origin did was fantastic, but nothing like what happened tonight with SpaceX.
Tweet spar
After the New Shepard flight, Bezos and Musk exchanged a series of snarky tweets that were funny, but appeared to have more than a bit of competition fueling them as well.
Jeff Bezos
The Falcon 9 first stage will now be thoroughly checked to see what damage it took and what it will take to clean it up and reuse it.
Eventually, this will be a less expensive and faster process than building one from scratch.
So in a sense, this test isn't over: Once a booster is re-used, then it will show that the next step in spaceflight has been truly achieved (much like, in a historical sense, the second flight of the Space Shuttle was just as important as the first).
Nothing is ever routine when it comes to space, so while this was a big step, many more lie ahead.
SpaceX has more Falcon 9 launches (and booster landings) scheduled, and will hopefully test its massive Falcon Heavy next year; this is essentially three Falcon 9s strapped together, and will have a higher lift capacity than any other rocket on Earth.
It's designed from the ground up to carry humans into space.
It won't be human-rated for some time, and in the meantime SpaceX has an order from NASA to send a crew of astronauts to the International Space Station in 2017.
Boeing has two orders for crewed launches, using its new CST-100 capsule. It's unclear who will launch first.
Either way, this is all great news. Two companies are competing to make access to space less expensive and more reliable, and a third, Blue Origin, is making big strides in crewed suborbital launches.
It's been a while --July 21, 2011 --since an American rocket brought humans to space. But it like America is poised to make it happen again.
