Saturn V launches Apollo 11. Image: NASA, Marshall Image Exchange.

For the first time in history, a rocket has been reused successfully. SpaceX has been practicing round-trip rocketry for years: Falcon 9 launchers have flown to/fro 13 times, with 8 perfecting the touchdown. That meant 8 rockets sitting in inventory. But never had a launch rocket yet been reused. “It’s been 15 years to get to this point,” stated Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX and Tesla, who now prices reused rockets at a discount. Packaging and discounts are a sign of private industry in space, a step beyond NASA or ESA, the European Space Agency. But reuse means more than discount: Luxembourg’s SES used the occasion to launch a communications satellite, descendant of COMSAT, to convey an environmental message. SpaceX sent a message too: in the spirit of whimsy, Falcon 9 landed on a welcoming vessel – an autonomous ship – named: “Of Course I Still Love You.”

For video of the Falcon landing on “Of Course I Still Love You:”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqnQ1dHnUr0

Building the World Blog by Kathleen Lusk Brooke and Zoe G Quinn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.