SUCCESS! SpaceX just pulled off its most difficult launch yet

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SpaceX just launched a rocket carrying a Japanese communications satellite at 1:21 a.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida. The mission was a success, with the satellite safely reaching orbit approximately 30 minutes after launch.

Even more impressive, the team successfully landed the lower half of the Falcon 9 rocket on a drone ship floating a couple hundred miles off the coast.

The rocket carried the satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit approximately 25,000 miles above Earth.

But while that was the main mission, the more amazing thing is that the SpaceX team replicated their amazing April 8 feat of landing the first stage of its 229-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket on a robotic drone ship.

Getting a satellite into GTO requires even more liquid oxygen and liquid kerosene fuel than the April 8 launch, which carried cargo and an inflatable room to the International Space Station (ISS). The nature of this launch means the rocket was going faster and had less fuel to attempt a landing on the drone ship, delightfully named "Of Course I Still Love You."

SpaceX wasn't very optimistic about sticking the booster landing. The company considered it a bonus mission it didn't have to pull off, but one that would go a long way in achieving its long-term vision for spaceflight. The company stated that the extreme velocity and re-entry heating of the Falcon 9 made "a successful landing unlikely."

Translation: We thought our rocket will most likely explode into bits when it tries to land itself. Still, a successful landing from this type of launch would be both historic and dramatic.

But it worked!

You could hear the tension in the room as the rocket came in for a landing.

The livestream flashed bright, everything invisible for a moment.

And then things cleared, the rocket safely aboard "Of Course I Still Love You."

Musk had expressed some hope that there might be a 50/50 chance of sticking the landing before the launch.

Why sticking the landing - again - was huge

Most rockets cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, yet are rendered as garbage the moment they launch. Instead of being recycled, they crash into the ocean and sink to the bottom after lofting a payload into orbit.

But SpaceX had already successfully landed the lower stage of a Falcon 9 rocket both on land and, most recently, on the "Of Course I Still Love You" drone ship.

Tonight's attempt was a much more difficult one.

This ocean landing has been attempted on about five separate occasions in the past year, with only one success prior to this one. This was the fourth Falcon 9 flight of this year.

The last time they attempted this landing after delivering a satellite into GTO - similar to this JCSAT-14 mission - the rocket landed hard and exploded on contact with SpaceX's other drone ship, called "Just Read the Instructions."

On another two occasions, it wasn't possible to try and land the Falcon 9, since one rocket exploded shortly after launch and high seas prevented another landing attempt.

This time, SpaceX showed what they could do. 

Each Falcon 9 costs about $62 million. That SpaceX can land part of that hardware, clean it up, and refuel it for a future launch, makes this a history-making event, especially since this landing was significantly more difficult than the last one.

A second successful landing under more difficult circumstances helps demonstrate that we're even closer to an era of spaceflight that's radically less expensive.

 

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