SpaceX's billionaire founder Elon Musk just got a big boost in his space race with Amazon's Jeff Bezos.
Dust off the history books, because today is a huge moment for space travel. For the first time ever, Elon Musk’s SpaceX has returned part of an orbital rocket safely to the ground. It promises to usher in a new era of reusable spaceflight.
The Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 8.29 p.m. EST yesterday (1.29 a.m. GMT today), taking 11 satellites to orbit as part of the ORBCOMM-2 mission. But undoubtedly the highlight of the mission occurred ten minutes later, when the first stage of the rocket used its thrusters to touch down at a landing site 10 kilometers (six miles) from the launch pad, having traveled to a height of 200 kilometers (125 miles).
