The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket successfully lands at historic Complex 13 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Monday, Dec. 21, 2015. The rocket, carrying 11 communications satellites for Orbcomm, Inc., is... (Associated Press) 
 
 SpaceX sent a Falcon rocket soaring toward orbit Monday night with 11 small satellites, its first mission since an accident last summer. Then in an even more astounding feat, it landed the 15-story leftover booster back on Earth safely. 
 
 It was the first time an unmanned rocket returned to land vertically at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and represented a tremendous success for SpaceX. The company led by billionaire Elon Musk is striving for reusability to drive launch costs down and open up space to more people. 
 
 "Welcome back, baby!" Musk tweeted after touchdown. 
 
 "It's a revolutionary moment," Musk later told reporters. "No one has ever brought a booster, an orbital-class booster, back intact." 
 
 What's significant is that this was a useful mission, Musk noted, not merely a practice flight. "We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 satellites," he said. 
 
 SpaceX employees broke into cheers and chants, some of them jumping up and down, following the smooth touchdown nine minutes after liftoff. Previous landing attempts ended in fiery blasts, but those aimed for an ocean platform. 
 
 Musk said he ran outside and heard the sonic boom of the returning booster just as it landed; he assumed it had exploded. He learned the happy truth when he went back into Launch Control and saw video of the standing rocket. 
 
 "I can't quite believe it," he said. "It's quite shocking." 
 
 Musk said the landing appeared close to perfect and the company "could not have asked for a better mission or a better day." 
 
 The top officer at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Brig. Gen. Wayne Monteith, noted that the returning booster "placed the exclamation mark on 2015." 
 
 "This was a first for us at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, and I can't even begin to describe the excitement the team feels right now having been a part of this historic first-stage rocket landing," Monteith said in a statement. 
 
 Across the country, SpaceX employees jammed company headquarters in Hawthorne, California, anxiously awaiting success. They cheered at full throttle when the first stage separated cleanly two minutes into flight and reoriented itself for an unprecedented return to Cape Canaveral. Then the roar became deafening, as TV cameras showed the first-stage booster landing on extended legs at its new, dedicated landing zone. SpaceX commentators called it "incredibly exciting" and were visibly moved by the feat. 
 
 "This has been a wildly successful return to flight for SpaceX," said one SpaceX launch commentator. "We made history today." 
 
 Blue Origin, another billionaire's rocket company, successfully landed a booster last month in West Texas. That rocket, though, had been used for a suborbital flight. The SpaceX booster was more powerful and flying faster in order to put satellites into orbit. 
 
 The touchdown was a secondary objective for SpaceX. The first was hoisting the satellites for OrbComm, a New Jersey-based communication company. All 11 were successfully deployed. 
 
 OrbComm chief executive officer Marc Eisenberg seemed just as excited about the booster landing as his satellites reaching orbit. 
 
 "Here she comes back," Eisenberg said via Twitter, sharing a photo of the returning booster. Then: "Bullseye." 
 
 The booster-landing zone, a former Atlas missile-launching site, is about six miles from the launch pad. SpaceX is leasing the touchdown area — marked by a giant X — from the Air Force. The reinforced concrete provides a stable surface, unlike the barges used for the initial attempts, primarily for increased safety. 
 
 On its previous flight back in June, SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket failed shortly after liftoff, destroying a supply ship intended for the International Space Station. A snapped strut in the upper stage was to blame. SpaceX spent months correcting the problem and improving the unmanned rocket. It hopes to resume supply runs for NASA in February. 
 
 Musk, who also runs the Tesla electric car company, said he can drastically reduce launch costs by reusing rocket parts. Three tries at vertical landings of the first-stage boosters earlier this year failed; in each case, the segment aimed for a modified barge off the coast of Jacksonville, Florida. This time, Musk opted for a true land landing. 
 
 Musk said it will take a few more years to iron everything out, for actual reusability of his rockets. In the meantime, he's working to transform the SpaceX Dragon capsules from cargo ships into real spaceships for crews traveling to and from the orbiting station. 
 
 His ultimate goal, for human missions, is Mars. 
 
 "This was a critical step along the way to being able to establish a city on Mars," he said. "That's what all this is about." 
 
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 SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com/ 

 On Monday evening, for the first time in aerospace history, a rocket took off vertically from its launchpad, pierced the boundary of space and deposited its second stage into orbit, and returned intact to Earth, landing upright not far from where its journey began. 
 
 The private American company SpaceX—and its self-avowedly supervillain-esque CEO, Elon Musk— have at last seized the quarry that their company has pursued for years: VTOL, or the Vertical Take Off and Landing of an orbital rocket. 
 
 The task was completed by a Falcon 9 rocket, which launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida at 8:29 p.m. Eastern time. Even if the take-off had not gone successfully, the launch signified a return to flight for SpaceX: The company had not successfully launched a rocket since a different Falcon 9 exploded immediately after take-off in June. 
 
 The company had attempted two previous vertical landings. In January of this year, and again in April, a Falcon 9 rocket failed to touch down on the custom-built robotic barge waiting for it in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Both times, the rocket nearly hit its mark, before a system failed and the entire vehicle toppled over: 
 
 The company’s quest took on new urgency last month. Two days before Thanksgiving, Blue Origin, a space tourism company owned by Jeff Bezos, announced that it had successfully launched an uncrewed rocket and landed it upright in the Arizona desert. Musk congratulated Bezos on Twitter after the launch, but he and his team were quick to highlight, correctly, that Blue Origin’s rocket could never have entered orbit. 

 The most elusive initials in the business of space flight are SSTO — or single stage to orbit — the business of flying a reusable spacecraft that takes off in one piece, goes to space in one piece and lands in one piece. Every airplane that has ever been built works that way. But spacecraft? Not so much. 
 
 Rockets shed stages as they go because each piece of hardware you cut loose and drop in the ocean makes you lighter — and thus faster. But getting to space in one piece requires huge engines with lots of fuel to lift and land a single, solid machine. Huge engines and lots of fuel, however, add weight, which requires even bigger engines and more fuel—and on and on. 
 
 The next best thing is to launch rockets that shed stages, but don’t dump them all in the ocean. Instead, the first stage lands in one piece to be used again, sending the upper stages to space. There’s still a lot of waste in that system, and not everything comes home to be used again. But the first stage does live to fight (and fly) another day, and that cuts costs dramatically. 
 
 The Delta Clipper, built by McDonnell Douglas, tried something like that in the 1990s: flying just one stage up and back — and failed. The shuttle kind of tried it, except the external tank was not reusable and the shuttle itself was an expensive, dangerous, finicky ship that lost two crews. 
 
 Today’s news out of SpaceX, that after multiple tries it has succeeded in launching a rocket and landing a first stage back on the ground while the payload went on to orbit, was thus a milestone in space. It’s not the whole SSTO loaf, but an important half. 
 
 Jeff Bezos — celebrated bookseller and aspiring rocketeer — made his own kind of history in November when his Blue Origin rocket company successfully fired a single stage rocket to an altitude of 62 miles (100 km) and brought it back for a similar upright landing. But puncturing the atmosphere to touch space is different from launching multiple orbital vehicles as SpaceX has, and while Bezos recovered the entirety of his rocket, he has a long way to go before he puts real space flight points on the board. 
 
 The private space game remains a wide open contest, and Blue Origin or SpaceX or any one of multiple other competitors may ultimately come out on top. But for today at least, SpaceX has scored a very big win. 

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– SpaceX dusted off its Falcon rocket Monday night, launching it toward orbit for the first time since an accident over the summer. That first part was successful; the second part was, in the words of Elon Musk, "a revolutionary moment": The New York Times reports as the "second stage of the rocket," which was carrying 11 satellites, kept heading toward orbit, the "engines of the booster stage reignited to turn it around." Ten minutes after liftoff, the 15-story leftover booster landed back in Cape Canaveral, Fla., vertically. It's the first time that's been achieved with an unmanned rocket. What else you need to know about the historic moment: The tweets: "Welcome back, baby!" Musk tweeted following touchdown. (Musk's first reaction, however, was to assume the rocket had exploded. The AP reports he ran outside and thought the sonic boom he heard spelled doom. Upon reentering Launch Control video showed him it was standing.) Rival Jeff Bezos offered this: "Congrats @SpaceX on landing Falcon's suborbital booster stage. Welcome to the club!" About that tweet: The Atlantic points out that it "gleefully [ignores] the orbital-suborbital difference." Last month, Bezos' Blue Origin space firm launched its own reusable rocket into space (to a suborbital height of about 62 miles), which Musk noted was very different from launching something into orbit. The icing on the record-setting cake: Musk pointed out that this wasn't just a successful test run, but rather a purposeful mission, reports the AP. "We achieved recovery of the rocket in a mission that actually deployed 11 [data-relay] satellites" for New Jersey-based Orbcomm. A remarkable photo, video from SpaceX: A long-exposure photo that captures launch, re-entry, and landing; this video shows the astounding landing. Why this matters beyond the history books: "The most elusive initials in the business of space flight are SSTO—or single stage to orbit—the business of flying a reusable spacecraft that takes off in one piece, goes to space in one piece and lands in one piece," writes Jeffrey Kluger for Time. That is, he notes, how every airplane has ever worked. As for achieving this in space, what SpaceX did is "not the whole SSTO loaf, but an important half."