Falcon 9 rocket takes off with a cargo capsule bound for International Space Station before successfully landing on drone barge in fifth attempt

This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

SpaceX landed a reusable rocket on a robotic drone on Friday, its fifth attempt and a historic achievement in a budding space race between billionaires to revolutionize spaceflight.

Space mission to test billionaire's plan for astronauts to live in a bubble Read more

The Falcon 9 rocket took off with a Dragon cargo capsule at 4.43pm ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida, under clear conditions.

SpaceX employees gathered around the company’s Mission Control in Hawthorne, California, cheered wildly and chanted “USA” after the booster touched down on the barge off the coast of Cape Canaveral. Previous barge attempts had failed.

The private spaceflight company, which has shuttled cargo to the International Space Station and satellites into orbit since 2012, set off to deliver 7,000lb of supplies and a habitat experiment to the station – an inflatable room for astronauts.

The Dragon and inflatable room should reach the space station on Sunday.

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who owns SpaceX, has said he hopes to pioneer reusable rockets that will make spaceflight vastly less expensive – and thus open new frontiers of exploration and opportunity in space.

The company has attempted several landings before, none successful save one on a landing pad on solid earth. Musk hopes to land the rocket on a “drone ship” because the robotic vessel can meet the rocket on its descent, reducing fuel expenses, and because a landing at sea is safer than one near people.

A few of the attempted marine landings were almost successful. One landing was on point but “too hard for survival”, Musk said. Earlier this year, another rocket suffered a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”, as Musk put it, meaning that one of its legs broke and the rocket blew up. Last month, another attempt failed, though in windy conditions that even Musk’s optimism couldn’t quite surmount.

SpaceX’s last resupply mission to the space station also failed last year – the rocket exploded minutes after takeoff – though it has accomplished six others without incident.

Musk has a rival in Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon and the owner of Blue Origin, a spaceflight company that has successfully landed a smaller vehicle on solid ground three times. Unlike Musk, Bezos does not allow live broadcast of launches and landings, and his rockets do not carry cargo to the ISS.

The experimental inflatable module SpaceX carried up on Friday represents “the future”, the ISS program manager, Kirk Shireman, told reporters on Thursday. “Humans will be using these kinds of modules as we move further and further off the planet and, actually, as we inhabit low Earth orbit.”

The habitat is called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (Beam) and it will be tested over two years to learn how it withstands the extremities of space.

Many of the other experiments being ferried to the station pertain to life sciences, and will help provide “an amazing bonanza for the biological sciences”, Nasa’s Kirt Costello told reporters at the briefing.