SpaceX lands another rocket on a drone ship in the Pacific, despite rough seas
SpaceX is getting it done.
The Elon Musk-founded company just launched and then landed another of its newly upgraded Falcon 9 rocket boosters.
The rocket carrying a clutch of communications satellites launched them on their way to orbit from California's Vandenberg Air Force Base at 7:39 a.m. ET before the first stage of the booster came back in for a landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean about 10 minutes later.
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Landing the booster is particularly impressive this time around. According to SpaceX, the seas were extremely rough for this landing attempt, with high wind shear near the drone ship.
And SpaceX, as is their way, did the whole thing live.
You can watch the launch in the window below starting at about the 22-minute mark, with the landing coming in about 8 minutes later. (The video will be live until the 10 satellites deploy in orbit about an hour after launch.)
The landing itself isn't much to look at in the webcast -- the satellite feed usually cuts out when the rocket comes in for a landing, and it's very dark on the West Coast right now -- but it represents SpaceX's entire business plan.
Musk has said that the company is looking to lower the cost of launching to space by orders of magnitude. In order to do that, SpaceX is landing rockets, refurbishing them, and then launching new missions with them.
The company's launch cadence has also increased over the last year or so.
SpaceX also launched and landed an upgraded Falcon 9 rocket on the East Coast in the wee hours of Sunday morning. And in 2017, the company managed to launch 18 times, setting a new SpaceX record for annual launches.
Wednesday morning was a busy time for rocket launches.
About 15 minutes before SpaceX's Falcon 9 took flight, Europe's Ariane 5 rocket launched four navigation satellites to orbit from its launch site in French Guiana. That rocket is considered expendable, however, so no boosters came back in for a landing.
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.
