SpaceX successfully lands the Falcon 9 rocket upright

[Hakumental]

The rocket came back to a clean touchdown at Cape Canaveral after helping to drop a payload of commsats in orbit, and right in the middle of the freaking platform. Absolutely insane.





This is a huge - I'll do the cheesy thing and bold that: huge - first step toward reusable rockets, which would be another huge first step to driving down commercial spaceflight costs. (Imagine if every time we drove a bus, we had to drive the bus off a cliff after dropping everyone off. Now imagine you invented brakes.) It's also a hell of a moment for SpaceX, which came so close to doing this in January but had to watch that heartbreaking crash go viral instead. Less than a year later, they pulled it off beautifully.

Bonus vid of the crowd popping like mad:



Absolutely awesome and a historic moment for spaceflight. Really proud of SpaceX.

[Hit Girl]

It looks cool, but it depends greatly on how much damage each rocket sustains during flights and whether it's more economical to refurbish them after every launch and landing, or simply to build a new rocket each time.

[Hakumental]

Yeah, determining what kind of wear and tear the rocket took is the next step. It still bodes extremely well for the future, though - now they've shown they can not only hit the landing, but land it right up the road from a service hangar. Even if they only achieve a 50% reuse rate, it still adds up to massive savings.

[prettynami]

Good good good. One step closer to all of us living out the 1950s sci-fi rocket dreams of tomorrow! Rocky Jones would be proud! Very cool stuff, I can't imagine the technology that went into giving that landing so much precision, let alone how strong that thing must be built to even come back down for a landing.

[twiggy101]

Almost looks like a lift off in reverse.

[Mr. Medium Shot]

I had the pleasure of producing the live coverage of this event on the only local TV station that carried it from start to finish!

Now that I've bragged, this is a big step for our space program. It doesn't mean people will fly to Mars tomorrow, but this is one giant leap towards that goal. It could save untold millions of dollars on space travel, thus making a lot more missions possible. It's an awesome visual too.