SpaceX did it. On Monday night the first stage of its Falcon 9 rocket soared into space, separated from the second stage, and then made a guided flight back to a landing site in Florida. The historic flight marked the beginning of the orbital economy by promising a future of dramatically lower launch costs.

The company had twice tried to land on an autonomous drone ship. The first time the rocket hit too hard and exploded on impact. The second attempt again landed slightly too hard, breaking two of its legs and tipping over. The third attempt, at a newly designated landing site less than a mile from SpaceX's processing facilities in Florida, looked almost too easy on terra firma.

"I wasn't at all confident that we would succeed, but I'm really glad of it," Musk said in a teleconference Monday night, in response to a question from Ars. "It's been 13 years since SpaceX was started. We've had a lot of close calls. I think people here are overjoyed."

A webcast of the landing attempt, made several hours after sunset, showed a brilliant light falling out of the sky and then, as the smoke cleared, a rocket stood on the ground. Just minutes earlier the Falcon 9's first stage had rocketed nearly 200 kilometers (120 miles) into space far off the Florida coast, used nitrogen attitude thrusters to make an abrupt U-turn, fired its engines to create a reversed ballistic arc, and finally reoriented itself for re-entry to Earth's atmosphere with the engines pointed toward the ground for a final landing burn.

As employees of SpaceX watched from the company's Hawthorne, California-based headquarters, they cheered raucously and then broke into chants of "U-S-A, U-S-A!" The company is one of two US firms building spacecraft to end NASA's dependence upon Russia for transportation to the International Space Station. However SpaceX is unique in that neither its rocket nor spacecraft rely on Russian suppliers.

The launch was closely watched for several reasons. It marked a successful return to flight for SpaceX after an accident in June with its Falcon 9 rocket. The company also launched 11 ORBCOMM communications satellites far above Earth. And, it flew an upgraded variant of the Falcon 9 rocket.

Nevertheless, the successful return of the Falcon 9 booster to Florida was clearly highlighted Monday night.

In some ways, the mission marks the dawn of a new space age. It begins to deliver on the promise of reusable launch vehicles, which is critical to increasing access to space. SpaceX's founder, Elon Musk, has said it costs the company about $60 million to build a Falcon 9 rocket. The propellant itself only costs $200,000. Thus there is the potential to slash the costs of spaceflight by 10, or even 100 times.

Now the company will have to demonstrate it can refurbish a rocket stage with relatively little work, and then it must re-fly the stage. With the space shuttle, NASA had a largely reusable vehicle, but it required a huge standing army of employees to turn around. SpaceX must show it can do this more efficiently, and then do it consistently. With Monday night's successful flyback, however, it arguably took the most difficult step.

"It makes you rethink the way we do business," said Eric Stallmer, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an advocate of commercial human spaceflight. "That's the bottom line. Is there a better way to do spaceflight? It used to be if, or when, we could reuse rockets. But now we've crossed off the 'if,' and the 'when.' It changes the way the industry is going to do business."

Musk has been at the vanguard of companies seeking to push the boundaries of reusability even as NASA has moved in the opposite direction with its new rocket, the Space Launch System. That rocket is entirely expendable, including its four RS-25 engines. Those same engines were reused after each space shuttle flight.

In founding SpaceX, Musk has made it clear that his ultimate goal is to establish a colony on Mars, thus ensuring the survival of the human race if there is some kind of extinction event on Earth. "This is a critical step along the way toward being able to establish a city on Mars," he said Monday night. Reusability is vital to making a Mars colony happen, Musk said, because with only expendable rockets, any kind of Mars development would prove prohibitively expensive. "That's what this was all about," he said.

SpaceX's achievement follows the successful landing of Blue Origin's New Shepard spacecraft and propulsion module after it flew into suborbital space in November. "Welcome to the club," tweeted Blue Origin's founder, Jeff Bezos, shortly after SpaceX's flight.

However, it is worth noting that on Monday night the Falcon 9 rocket descended from about twice the altitude as the New Shepherd vehicle, and at about twice the speed, approximately Mach 7.5. It did not simply drop back to Earth from a vertical launch; rather, the Falcon 9 flew hundreds of kilometres away from the coast before turning around and flying back. By doing so it became the first orbital rocket ever to achieve such a feat, and presumably the first of many.