SpaceX launches Falcon 9 rocket, lands booster back on land

James Dean | Florida Today

Show Caption Hide Caption SpaceX launches Falcon 9, successfully lands booster SpaceX successfully launched their Falcon 9 rocket carrying 11 satellites to low-Earth orbit. This mission also marked SpaceX's first successful landing of the first stage booster.

CAPE CANAVERAL — “The Falcon has landed.”

It may not top the Eagle’s 1969 moon landing, but SpaceX’s confirmation Monday night that it successfully landed a Falcon 9 rocket booster at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station could be remembered as a historic turning point in rocketry.

It marked the first time a large rocket has delivered spacecraft to orbit and returned to Earth intact, so that it could potentially fly again.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and other space entrepreneurs see reusable rockets as the key to dramatically reducing the cost of access to space, which could enable more missions and make exploration as far as Mars a more realistic goal.

The 230-foot Falcon 9 blasted off from Launch Complex 40 at 8:29 p.m. ET, rumbling aloft with 1.5 million pounds of thrust and carrying 11 commercial satellites to begin its return to flight after a June 28 launch failure.

About two-and-a-half minutes later, the 14-story first stage dropped away and began the first of three engine burns sending it back toward a concrete pad at SpaceX’s “Landing Complex 1” at the Cape, the former Launch Complex 13.

Observers along the Space Coast and beyond could see rocket engines firing in darkness as the booster descended from as high as 124 miles up and slowed its fall from hypersonic speed.

A loud “boom” could be heard shortly after touchdown a few miles down the coast from where the booster had lifted off, but camera images showed it upright.

The Falcon had landed.

Thousands of employees at SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., erupted in cheers and chants of “USA, USA!”

Cheers also rang out at Kennedy Space Center, where hundreds of people associated with Orbcomm Inc., whose 11 satellites were on top of the rocket’s upper stage and still headed toward space, were gathered to watch.

The cheers continued as all 11 satellites were deployed safely in orbits about 500 miles up, ensuring that the day’s primary mission was a success for the publicly traded provider of machine-to-machine communications, an industry sometimes referred to as the Internet of Things.

But the primary mission was also an afterthought.

All 11 @ORBCOMM_Inc satellites have been deployed in nominal orbits. pic.twitter.com/cHSk1k29vj — SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 22, 2015

Amidst the celebration behind them, commentators on SpaceX’s Webcast could barely keep their composure after the successful landing was confirmed.

About a month ago, Blue Origin, the private space firm founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, also landed a booster after a test flight in Texas.

That was a smaller stage that did not travel as fast and lofted a capsule only briefly into space before it fell back to the ground.

SpaceX twice earlier this year had attempted to land boosters on ships in the ocean, showing an ability to precisely control the stages’ return from space.

Both attempts, however, ended with the booster unable to stay upright.

SpaceX decided it was time to return to land, as was always the goal.

After the landing, plans called for SpaceX to “safe” the rocket stage by purging excess fuel and oxidizer into a tanker, venting other gasses and making any explosives inert.

A crane would then lift the stage onto a stand to allow the landing legs to be folded up or removed before the booster would be placed on a transporter in a horizontal position to be rolled back to SpaceX facilities.

It was unknown how long that process might take.

Live video from LZ-1 pic.twitter.com/Ve6gEXfOdh — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015

Still to be determined is whether, after the spectacle of a landing, the Falcon 9 stage is in good enough condition to be reused at least once, if not more, to fulfill the promise of reusability.

Bezos has called reusability the “Holy Grail” of rocketry.

Musk agrees: “It’s really a massive difference if we can make reusability work,” he said recently at a conference.

Follow James Dean on Twitter: @flatoday_jdean