SpaceX lands another a rocket booster back on Earth after flying to space. Here's the GIF to prove it.
SpaceX just pulled off yet another beautiful rocket landing.
The Elon Musk-founded company brought back the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket to a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean after launching a brand new NASA mission on its way to orbit.
The mission, called TESS -- short for Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite -- is designed to hunt for alien planets circling distant stars.
The TESS rocket landing marks the 24th Falcon 9 first stage landing for SpaceX. Check the landing out for yourself:
The drone ship's onboard camera usually cuts out during these kinds of landings because it's difficult to keep a tenuous satellite link in the middle of the ocean when the ship's being jostled around by a rocket's engine.
The rocket booster uses excess fuel to relight its engines to come in for a safe, soft landing on the drone ship.
Sometimes, depending on how much fuel is left over, SpaceX will land these rockets back on a pad in Florida instead of at sea.
SpaceX doesn't do this just to show off. Instead, it performs these kinds of landings in order to reduce the cost of spaceflight.
Rather than using each rocket once and then discarding it to burn up in Earth's atmosphere, SpaceX aims to bring these rockets home in order to refurbish them and use the boosters to fly more missions.
Eventually, this could reduce the cost of space travel down to only paying for the fuel necessary to get something into orbit or beyond. While SpaceX has successfully re-flown boosters already, such extreme cost savings have not yet been achieved.
Once TESS makes it to its expected orbit, the satellite will spend the next couple years taking a survey of thousands of stars.
The sensitive spacecraft is able to detect small dips in a star's light created when a planet passes across its face.
This impressive launch probably started the planet hunter off on the right foot.
Topics SpaceX
Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
