by David Kavanagh

Private spaceflight company SpaceX has made history today by coordinating the first ever successful and up-right landing of its powerful First Stage Falcon 9 rocket in Cape Canaveral, California.

The unmanned, 23-storey-tall rocket had been sent to deploy 11 satellites for telecommunications giant ORBCOMM on Tuesday as part of the first flight organised by SpaceX since one of its ISS-bound cargo rockets was destroyed minutes after launch in an accident in June.

Although Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezo’s Blue Origin, a primary competitor to SpaceX, achieved a similar feat during a landing test last month, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is the first rocket to deliver a payload for a commercial orbital mission and safely return.

But why does it matter?

Falcon 9 rockets, like all big space exploration vehicles, are expensive to produce and have, up to now, always been rendered unusable upon re-entry, either because they crash into the sea or are burned up in the atmosphere.

The upgraded variant used during the ORBCOMM-2 mission instead landed smoothly on its specially designed deployable legs.

Business magnate and high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk co-founded SpaceX in 2002 and endeavours to, among other space-based missions, eventually turn space tourism into reality.

Ultimately, having access to reusable rockets that make use of advanced systems of precise navigation, guidance, and thrust control should make the operational and time costs involved in these sorts of tasks far more affordable since the expensive machines would not have to be rebuilt for every launch.

It also gives SpaceX a noticeable advantage over its rivals in the extremely competitive private space launch industry.

“Reusability is the critical breakthrough needed in rocketry to take things to the next level,” said Musk at the MIT AeroAstro Centennial Symposium in October.

While the construction of a stable armada of reusable rockets will take some years and great coordination, today’s Falcon 9 success demonstrates that it is possible.

As Wall Street Journal’s Andy Pasztor put it, this historic landing really does have the potential to “shake up [the] space industry.”

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