Spacex reuses a first stage booster and successfully relanded it for further launches in a historic milestone in spaceflight

SpaceX has successfully re-flown a first stage booster from one of its Falcon 9 rockets and they successfully landed it again.

The first-stage booster, which was previously used on a mission 11 months ago, helped send a telecommunications satellite into orbit from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center.javascript:void(0);

It marks an important milestone for SpaceX in its quest for re-usability.

Traditionally, rockets are expendable – their various segments are discarded and destroyed during an ascent.

The California outfit, in contrast, aims to recover Falcon first-stages and fly them multiple times to try to reduce the cost of its operations.

And to emphasize this point, Thursday’s booster was also brought back under control to land on a barge stationed out in the Atlantic.

Spacex is already a low cost space launch leader. Reusing rocket stages could massively lower the cost of space access.

SpaceX predicts that using recycled first stages could eventually reduce the cost of a launch by about 30 percent, from $60 million to $40 million, but for now it plans to offer only a 10-percent discount to customers who buy launches with reused stages.