And SpaceX sticks the landing!

Taking a page out of Simone Biles’s book, Elon Musk’s SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed on a droneship off the shore of Florida after launching a satellite into space. This marks an eighth Falcon 9 launch of 2016, and the 6th time ever that a Falcon 9 rocket has managed to land after a launch. So what does this all mean?

In IT Blogwatch, we reach for the stars.

William Harwood gives us the background:

Making SpaceX’s eighth flight in…six months, the 229-foot-tall Falcon 9’s nine first-stage engine ignited…at 1:26 a.m. Eastern…Arcing to the east atop 1.7 million pounds of thrust, the…rocket rapidly shed weight and smoothly accelerated…breaking through the “sound barrier” a little more than a minute after liftoff.
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The first stage engines shut down as expected…two and a half minutes after liftoff and the stage fell away to begin its landing try. The second stage’s single engine ignited…to continue the payload’s boost to orbit.

And what was that payload? And how did that landing work? David Szondy has the details:

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