SpaceX outdid themselves with a picture-perfect rocket landing
For space nerds, there's nothing better than a rocket landing.
On Friday, SpaceX brought one of its Falcon 9 rocket stages in for a landing back in Florida after launching an uncrewed Dragon capsule loaded down with supplies to the International Space Station for NASA.
It was one of the Elon Musk-founded company's most beautiful landings to date, taking place in clear blue skies at SpaceX's Landing Zone-1 back on land in Cape Canaveral, Florida.
The landing serves as a reminder of the promise of reusability in spaceflight.
In previous eras, rockets and spacecraft would fly once before being discarded after their first missions. Musk wasn't into that.
Instead, SpaceX's goal since the beginning has focused on creating a fleet of reusable rockets that can launch, land, and then fly again with very little time in between for refurbishment.
The rocket launched and landed on Friday had already flown to space and come back home before, when it flew a mission in June. The Dragon capsule also flew to the Space Station already in 2015.
This kind of reusability can help reduce the cost of flying payloads to space, allowing more people and nations access to orbit than ever before.
This was the company's 17th launch of the year, the highest number of launches annually in SpaceX's history.
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.
