SpaceX Finally Gets Its Fairy Tale Rocket Landing Ending

Try and try until you succeed, goes the oft quoted aphorism. In Elon Musk and SpaceX's case, even if each attempt costs millions of dollars. After several disastrous attempts at landing, and even one disastrous take off, SpaceX has finally achieved the milestone that it has been working towards for years, possibly the very cornerstone of its existence. It has successfully, safely, and without incident, landed a Falcon 9 stage one rocket back to Earth. Almost ironically, it was more successful landing it on solid ground that it was in water-based attempts.

SpaceX's mandate is to ultimately make space travel more economical, both in missions to space stations as well as future tourist attractions or even space residences. Part of making that possible is being able to reuse as much of the rocket as possible, bringing down the need for creating new rockets each and every time one is destroyed on reentry.

To that end, SpaceX has made several attempts at landing the stage one of a rocket, which is the part that normally gets destroyed and thrown away but is also one of the most expensive parts. In the past, it has attempted to do so over water, which ended in explosions. This time, it prepared a concrete landing pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida. And this time, it was finally able to pull off the near impossible feat.

SpaceX's hour-long coverage can be seen below, but you can skip to the 41:00 mark when things come to a head.

SpaceX's monumental achievement is also a historic first in the field of space travel. Although Blue Origin, backed by Amazon's Jeff Bezos, also achieved a rocket landing last month, that was made during a suborbital test. SpaceX's test, on the other hand, was the first successful landing of an orbital launch rocket.

The next phase would be to actually reuse that stage one rocket, though SpaceX has yet to reveal when that will take place.

SOURCE: @SpaceX