[Faustie]

I'm afraid I haven't got any newspaper articles to copy and paste yet as this just happened, so I'll do my best to explain this to you myself. For those of you who haven't been following the latest developments in space travel, SpaceX has long been trying to land their Falcon 9 rockets back on the Earth, hoping to reuse the first stage to drastically reduce the costs of space access; if you can successfully land a rocket stage and re-use it, you can make a massive saving as refuelling the vehicle is incredibly cheap in comparison to the cost of building one.

Back in December, SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, managed to land the first stage of a Falcon 9 at Cape Canaveral. This was a historic day, as it proved to the world that recovery of an orbital rocket stage was possible. While this is a monumental achievement in itself, SpaceX then had to prove to the world that landing a first stage at sea was possible. It's not always possible to return to land, as many missions require a higher velocity, so the Falcon 9 would no longer have sufficient fuel to return the first stage to the landing zone. Hence, an autonomous droneship named 'Of Course I Still Love You' was sent to sea to serve as a landing site.

The previous attempts at this experimental mission failed. However, today on the 8th of April 2016, SpaceX succeeded in landing the first stage of a Falcon 9 rocket at sea. This is not only an incredible feat of engineering, but undoubtedly the beginnings of a new age of cheap(er) space flight.

For those of you who want to watch the exact moment of landing:

Why is this important? Space travel is responsible for far more than you might think. Research and development into space travel has created at least 60,000 new products, improved the quality of human life worldwide, enabled mass communications, and will hopefully one day make us a multi-planetary society. As Elon Musk has said, this is perhaps worth a little of our resources.

[George]

This is crazy impressive.

Elon Musk is now only a few steps away from being able to become the best super villain, ever.

[Innovative]

Well, I can only see great things for telsa in the future.

[Brynn]

I caught the landing when you linked it me on steam, and it was impressive how it landed on water.

[Brax]

Wow. That's amazing, not having to ditch billions of dollars in the ocean. Or space.