For the first time, SpaceX has successfully landed its first stage on its droneship. After successfully taking off and delivering Dragon on its way to the ISS, it performed a perfect landing on its droneship. I’m not sure why I still get excited at every SpaceX launch since I have no personal connection to them, but I do. It really feels like we are entering a new era of space travel. Successfully landing the first stage reliably is the key to cutting the cost of going to space by an order of magnitude. While it had landed once before at its land based landing pad, due to mission needs it seems like it will more frequently need to try to land at sea and it had failed in its first 4 attempts. Also, after the failure last June and it being space travel, even the success of the primary mission can’t be taken for granted. Watching this landing it almost seems to be too easy, but if anyone has watched the previous attempts it isn’t. People, read me, were starting to think landing at sea might just be too hard.
Note: the title image I used isn’t from today.