Launch trajectory of Japanese commercial satellite JCSat-14, enroute to 36,000 km above Earth pic.twitter.com/QHiiMdMMJ3
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2016
If the future is now, Elon Musk is the king of it.
The mogul's already making huge waves in the tech community with Tesla Motors and SolarCity. And now early on Friday morning, his company SpaceX successfully launched and landed a remote rocket on a drone barge ship, the second time that they've pulled off the feat in less than a month. SpaceX's first four attempts at shooting a rocket into space, spitting out a satellite and lowering it down for a soft, errorless landing on a pretty small ocean barge failed. Their January mission ended like this:
On April 8, Musk and company announced their first successful re-entry launch, blowing the minds of everyone who's the least bit familiar with the concept of gravity.
Friday's success is big deal in terms of space flight—figuring out how to successfully land and re-launch rockets into space could save NASA and other space programs a load of cash, and could help pioneer technologies necessary for a mission to Mars.
We'll leave the engineering details to Musk and his team, but this most recent success seems to have him pretty excited about the future of SpaceX.
May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2016