Falcon 9 first stage lands vertically after orbital launch

On the night of 21 December 2015, at 8:29 p.m. Eastern time, SpaceX had everything riding on a single countdown at Cape Canaveral. Six months earlier, a Falcon 9 had torn itself apart in flight on the CRS-7 cargo mission. Now the company was returning to flight with an extensively upgraded rocket, the 'Full Thrust' Falcon 9 burning densified, super-chilled propellants for the first time, carrying eleven Orbcomm communications satellites, and attempting something no one had ever done: flying the first stage back to a landing pad on land.

Around two and a half minutes after liftoff the first stage let go of its upper stage, flipped end over end, and began a sequence of burns to reverse course. Guided by grid fins through the thickening air, the 14-storey booster aimed for Landing Zone 1, a converted Cold War Atlas missile pad about nine kilometres from where it had departed. Its sonic booms cracked across the Space Coast, a sound so violent that some onlookers, and even people at SpaceX, briefly feared the stage had exploded.

Then the floodlights found it: the booster standing upright, intact, engines silent, legs planted on the pad. At SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, the workforce erupted into sustained, raucous celebration, and on the launch webcast came the instantly famous call, 'The Falcon has landed.' Minutes later the upper stage finished its own job perfectly, deploying all eleven Orbcomm satellites. The comeback flight had succeeded twice over.

Booster B1019 never flew again. SpaceX test-fired it, studied it, and then stood it up outside the Hawthorne factory as a monument. Two attempts to land on an ocean barge earlier that year had ended in spectacular crashes; after this night, the crashes became the exception. Within sixteen months a recovered booster would fly again, and within a decade vertical landings would number in the hundreds, transformed from miracle into routine.