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It was the private company’s second attempt in three days to launch the Deep Space Climate Observatory for NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Air Force.

Last-minute radar trouble halted Sunday’s countdown, then SpaceX skipped Monday because of rain. Tuesday’s forecast called for an 80 per cent chance of good flying weather.

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The high-priced hardware in question was the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, has been working to develop rockets that can be fully and rapidly reused. The primary obstacle to a dramatically expanded human presence in space is the incredible expense of launching anything out of Earth’s gravity. A huge factor in that cost is the fact that most rockets are discarded or destroyed after launch, requiring each mission to use a brand-new vehicle. (The solid rocket boosters that helped launch NASA’s now-retired space shuttles were reusable, but had to be carefully refurbished after each mission, which ended with them parachuting into the ocean to await retrieval.)

As Musk has often said, passenger air travel wouldn’t ever have worked if you needed a brand new plane for every trip. Making rockets reliably reusable would dramatically lower the costs of launching everything — probes, satellites, ships, supplies and people — into space. It would usher in a new era of space exploration.

The problem, of course, is that getting a rocket to soar into the sky, launch its payload into space and then return gently back to Earth is a gigantic technical challenge. It’s mind boggling, really. SpaceX has published videos online that show some of its early test flights, and it’s difficult to accept that what you’re seeing is not some Hollywood visual effect. Rockets blast off, zoom up into the sky … and stop in midair. Then they come back down and land at the same facility they took off from.