This time they did it.
After several unsuccessful attempts to land an unmanned rocket on a football-field-size floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, Elon Musk’s SpaceX finally pulled off the feat Friday afternoon in its first launch to resupply the International Space Station since its rocket exploded last year.
The landing, the first of a rocket’s first stage at sea, was heralded as yet another milestone for the burgeoning commercial spaceflight industry.
“It’s another step toward the stars. In order for us to really open up access to space, we have to have full and rapid reusability,” Musk said at a news conference afterward.
SpaceX and another space company, Blue Origin, are working to lower the cost of space flight, which has been so prohibitively expensive that it has long been the exclusive domain of governments.
Typically — and expensively — the first stages of rockets are ditched into the ocean after firing their engines for a few minutes and boosting a capsule to space.
