SpaceX rocket comes in for a fiery but successful landing after launching satellite
There will come a day when SpaceX landing a rocket back on Earth after launching a payload to space isn't a news story, but today is not that day.
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket took flight from launch pad 39A in Cape Canaveral, Florida at 3:34 p.m. ET, landing back on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean about 10 minutes later, after sending a Korean communications satellite on its way to orbit.
While the rocket does appear to have landed successfully, it looked "a little toasty," in the words of SpaceX's webcast host. The lower part of the Falcon 9 first stage seems to have caught fire during the landing.
The landing also faced an added complication thanks to choppy waters rocking SpaceX's drone ship, named "Of Course I Still Love You," in the wake of Tropical Storm Philippe and the major East Coast storm system that swept through the area over the weekend.
This marks the Elon Musk-founded company's 16th launch of the year, and the 19th time SpaceX has performed a successful rocket landing at sea or on land.
The Monday launch and landing is just the latest piece of evidence showing that SpaceX is doing exactly what it set out to do more than 10 years ago, despite facing long odds.
Ever since its founding in 2002, those working at SpaceX have been seeking to make reusable rockets a reality. By bringing rockets back to Earth after flying payloads to space, engineers on the ground can refurbish those launchers and use them for multiple missions, instead of the usual "one and done" philosophy that has dominated rocketry until now.
This may seem relatively insignificant, but it's actually the key to SpaceX's future viability as a company.
In Musk's view, this reusability could reduce the cost of flying to space for paying customers and governments by orders of magnitude, effectively making it so that customers only need to pay for the rocket fuel needed to get to orbit. The company has also managed to re-fly previously launched and landed boosters, proving out its reusability even more.
SpaceX's bigger plans -- like eventually creating a city on Mars and/or the moon -- also hinge upon reducing the cost of flying to space. So while these Falcon 9 landings seem somewhat routine, they serve a much larger purpose in the fabric of spaceflight today.
To that end, the company is also gearing up to fly its first test of the long-awaited Falcon Heavy rocket -- a large launcher designed to bring bigger payloads to orbit and beyond in the near future.
The long-delayed first flight is expected to occur from pad 39A by the very end of this year or at the beginning of 2018.
In December, SpaceX is planning to start launching Falcon 9 rockets from Space Launch Complex 40 in Cape Canaveral again after recovering from a rocket explosion in September 2016. That move will presumably free up 39A for Falcon Heavy launches in the relatively near future, SpaceX hopes.
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.
