SpaceX Successfully Reuses Rocket

The most expen­sive part of doing busi­ness in out­er space is get­ting there. The pri­vate space flight com­pa­ny SpaceX thinks it can change all that, and Thursday’s suc­cess­ful reuse of a rock­et was a big test of its busi­ness model.

SpaceX launched a com­mu­ni­ca­tions satel­lite from the Kennedy Space Cen­ter in Flori­da using a rock­et stage that had already been to space and back. SpaceX is bet­ting that this kind of recy­cling will low­er its costs and rev­o­lu­tion­ize space flight.

The rock­et land­ed ver­ti­cal­ly on a barge in the Atlantic Ocean a few min­utes after the launch.

To read the full arti­cle, vis­it KQED.