Rocket landing

Following a series of impressive yet explosive attempts to bring down its giant spaceship built for interplanetary travel, SpaceX has today successfully landed its Starship prototype without exploding for the first time.

Startup Rocket Lab has joined SpaceX and Blue Origin in the world of rocket recovery, today bringing its Electron booster back down to Earth for the first time ever as part of its landmark “Return to Sender” mission.

SpaceX’s rocket landings have now become so routine that it’s easy to forget such a thing had never been accomplished five years ago. Today, it sent up and welcomed back the same refurbished Falcon 9 rocket for a record sixth time.

​​Rocket landings have almost become routine for SpaceX since its Falcon 9 booster safely touched down on Earth for the first time in December 2015. But not everything went to plan for the company as it delivered supplies to the ISS today.

​In a few short years, SpaceX has turned rocket landings from extraordinary achievements into routine events. The company has today notched up another milestone by safely landing its Falcon 9 booster on Californian soil, its first ever landing on the US West Coast. ​

​Earlier today, SpaceX successfully launched and deployed its first two test satellites for Starlink, the rocket company's own constellation of thousands of communications satellites that aims to provide worldwide broadband internet access by 2024.

SpaceX's rocket landings have become almost routine in just a couple of years, but the company is still looking to push the boundaries. It was doing just that as a Falcon 9 booster came hurtling back to Earth toward the Atlantic Ocean, an encounter it was not expected to survive. But survive it did.

​Three times SpaceX has landed its Falcon 9 rocket on solid ground and three times it has shared video of the event to the world. But as the company continues to show, there is more than one way to skin a 20-story spacecraft.

​SpaceX is set to usher in a new era in space later this year when it launches the first rocket to ever make the trip beyond Earth's gravity well twice.

Sunday marked the fourth successive landing of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and crew capsule, with the testing of emergency parachute systems also carried out as planned. ​