SpaceX has just reached an important milestone in the History of space exploration, by successfully reusing a rocket that had already flown to space and landed back on earth.
Elon Musk dream of making space a lot more affordable to reach is now taking one more important step. The booster part of the rocket is the most expensive part, and by reusing it SpaceX will be to save dozens of millions of dollars on each launch. Even for its customers, the price to reach space can drop from 60 million dollars to 40 million dollars, which effectively means they'll be getting a "buy 2 get 1 free" deal out of it.
SpaceX had already landed several Falcon 9 booster, both on land as well as on its floating platforms, but this is the first time that one such booster was reused and launched into space once again. In this case it took nearly 4 months of preparation and tests, but Musk already has much more ambitious plans going forward, urging SpaceX to have a rocket ready to be reused in just 24h!
Update: SpaceX has already retrieved the nose cone of the rocket... which allows them to reuse a 6 million dollar piece that would usually be destroyed after each launch.
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