President Obama leads celebration on Twitter for SpaceX’s rocket landing at sea

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Obama and Musk
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shows President Barack Obama around the company’s Cape Canaveral rocket processing site in 2010. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

SpaceX’s first-ever at-sea rocket landing was cause for a Twitter celebration that drew in President Barack Obama as well as other space-loving luminaries.

SpaceX used its two-stage Falcon 9 rocket on Friday to send a Dragon cargo capsule on its way to the International Space Station from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Minutes later, the rocket’s first stage guided itself back from the edge of space and settled onto an autonomous drone ship, hundreds of miles out in the Atlantic Ocean.

Today astronauts used the space station’s robotic arm to grab the Dragon and bring it in for its berthing. Meanwhile, the drone ship is making its way back to Port Canaveral, Fla., where the rocket stage will be offloaded for testing and probable reuse.

The big picture is that recovering and reusing rocket components can lead to big savings, if it’s done quickly and efficiently. Last month, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell estimated that reusability could reduce launch costs by 30 percent. If you apply that to the $61 million list price for a Falcon 9 satellite launch, that translates to almost $20 million in savings.

SpaceX brought a Falcon 9 first stage back for a trouble-free touchdown in December. Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, has executed similar (but admittedly easier) rocket landings with its New Shepard suborbital spaceship. But achieving the feat at sea, which SpaceX sees as a requirement for routine rocket reusability, took much more effort: The company’s first four attempts fell short of success.

The fact that SpaceX finally did it on Friday drew a torrent of congratulatory tweets. Here’s a sampling, starting at the top:

From Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin:

From Chris Lewicki, president of Redmond-based Planetary Resources:

From Seattle tech entrepreneur Naveen Jain, one of the founders of the Moon Express lunar exploration venture:

From Bigelow Aerospace, which built the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (a.k.a. BEAM) that’s heading for the space station aboard the Dragon:

An update from SpaceX:

… Plus a pic on Instagram:

Coming back

A post shared by SpaceX (@spacex) on

A question about SpaceX’s launch (a.k.a. SpX-8) from British astronaut Tim Peake, who’ll be using the station’s robotic arm to bring the Dragon in for its berthing:

A promise from SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk:

And a request from Darth Vader:

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