SpaceX successfully lands Falcon 9 rocket for the first time

This is a big step toward the company being able to offer reusable rockets

SpaceX's entire model is built around rockets being reusable, and therefore saving money. That's kind of hard to do, of course, when they keep blowing up when they try to land.

That's why the news on Monday night is such a big deal for the company: for the first time ever it was able to successfully launch, and then land, a Falcon9 rocket.

11 satellites deployed to target orbit and Falcon has landed back at Cape Canaveral. Headed to LZ-1. Welcome back, baby!

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2015

SpaceX has been attempting to this all year, as the company outlined in a background on the mission that was put up on its website.

That included multiple attempts to land the rocket, first on water, and then on a barge, both of which failed. You may also recall the incident in June when one of its rockets blew up a few minutes after launching. 

Now SpaceX has finally done it, and this is likely the first step toward the company truly being able to truly offer rockets that can be reused.

This is a nice cap for what began as a nice year for SpaceX, with the company raising $1 billion from Google and Fidelity Investment in January, valuing it at $10 billion, but which also saw the aforementioned disastrous launches.

This year also saw SpaceX get some competition in the form of Blue Origin, another aerospace developer and manufacturer, which was founded by Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos. The company stole some of SpaceX's thunder by landing its own rocket at the end of November.

Bezos took to Twitter to congraluate SpaceX, while also possibly taking a slight jab at them as well.

Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) December 22, 2015

In addition to the Falcon 9 rocket, the company also launched eleven next generation OG2 satellites, which were successfully separated from the Falcon 9 launch vehicle into the proper insertion orbit. 

In a press release, Marc Eisenberg, the Chief Executive Officer of ORBCOMM, the company that made the satellites, also congratulated SpaceX on its achievement. 

“Today marks a significant milestone for our company. We’d like to thank our vendors and partners for their cooperation in this effort,” Eisenberg said.

“I’d also like to commend the ORBCOMM team for their hard work and dedication in making our second OG2 mission a success. Lastly, I’d like to congratulate SpaceX on making history by landing the Falcon 9’s reusable Stage one booster from a record altitude. It’s an exciting day for all of us in the space industry.”

So what happens now? Well, obviously there are many more launches that SpaceX has to complete to prove that its rockets are reusable.  Ironically, though, Musk will not be reusing this particular rocket, at least not according to The Verge, due to its historical value to the company. 

You can see the video of the rocket landing below: