On Monday night, the people living along the central Atlantic coast of Florida were treated to a new sight that may become common: a rocket coming back down to a gentle landing. “It really felt like it was right on top of us,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation of Hawthorne, Calif., or SpaceX for short, said. For SpaceX, the 8:29 p.m. liftoff of the Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was a threefold success. First, it marked the company’s return to flight after half a year. Second, SpaceX’s upgraded design for its Falcon 9 rocket worked flawlessly. Most significant to SpaceX’s ambitions, however, is that after the second stage of the rocket with the satellites continued on to orbit, the engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around, back to Cape Canaveral.
