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Associated Press

Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket not only blasted 11 satellites to orbit on Monday, but also brought its towering first-stage booster back down, with a historic landing at a pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
It was the company’s first launch since its rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station exploded June 28.
SpaceX employees at the company’s Hawthorne, Calif., headquarters cheered and gave high-fives after the rocket’s first stage turned around and landed vertically on a concrete pad 10 minutes after liftoff.
The much anticipated launch of 11 small satellites for OrbComm, a New Jersey company, had been repeatedly delayed as SpaceX employees worked through glitches with the upgraded rocket.
On Thursday, with the rocket vertical on the Florida launch pad, Musk tweeted that the liquid-oxygen fuel was “presenting some challenges.”
When everything then looked like a go Sunday, Musk tweeted that he had decided to wait one day when the conditions for landing the rocket looked 10 per cent better.
Musk has already tried twice to land the Falcon 9 on an unmanned ocean barge the size of a football field. The rocket successfully turned around, slowed from hypersonic speeds and hit its target on the barge. It then crashed.
Landing the rocket Monday was a giant step toward making spacecraft reusable — a longtime quest of Musk and aerospace engineers.
Their goal is to recycle the first stage, including its expensive engines, so it can be used repeatedly, lowering the cost of space travel.
SpaceX said landing the rocket was a secondary priority at the Monday launch. Its main goal was to blast OrbComm’s satellites to orbit and show the world that it recovered from the June 28 disaster, which cost NASA and taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.
Just two minutes after launch that day, the Falcon 9 disintegrated, destroying food and other supplies greatly needed on board the space station.
Musk said a company-led investigation had pointed to the failure of a 60cm strut holding one of many helium bottles on the rocket’s second stage.
He isn’t the only billionaire trying to build reusable rockets. Last month, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos revealed that his space company, Blue Origin, had successfully landed a test rocket at its launch site in West Texas, which it planned to use again.
“Full reuse is a game changer,” Bezos said then, “and we can’t wait to fuel up and fly again.”
But SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is a much different rocket from the one flown by Blue Origin.
SpaceX launches satellites into orbit and flies cargo to the space station. Blue Origin, on the other hand, has built a much smaller ship designed to fly passengers to suborbital space for a few minutes.


We have touchdown: SpaceX rocket makes an historic landing

A remodeled version of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rests on its pad as it is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on the launcher's first mission since a June failure in Cape Canaveral, Florida December 20, 2015. The rocket carries a payload of eleven satellites owned by Orbcomm, a New Jersey-based communications company. REUTERS/Steve Nesius

A sequence of photos show the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blasting off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday, before coming back to land (second right), and finally, resting again on its launch pad (right). Photos: Reuters

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