SpaceX successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket Friday at 4:43 p.m. ET from Cape Canaveral, Florida, sending 7,000 pounds of cargo and an inflatable room toward the International Space Station.
But the huge, history-making moment — spurring a crowd of people into a thundering roar of applause during a live webcast — was when the company landed a rocket on a robotic ship at sea.
At mission control, everyone began chanting "U-S-A! U-S-A!" after the rocket gently touched down on the ship, which is called "Of Course I Still Love You."
SpaceX, led by tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, has tried many times to do this, and all previous attempts ended in failure.
But this time it worked, and the feat could change spaceflight forever.
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Why sticking a rocket landing is a huge deal
The Falcon 9 rocket is a very odd bird.
Most rockets cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, yet are rendered as junk the moment they launch.
Instead of being recycled, they crash into the ocean and sink to the bottom after lofting a payload into orbit.
But after delivering Dragon into space on Friday, about half of the 229-foot-tall Falcon 9 rocket fell back to Earth and tried to land itself on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean.
SpaceX attempted this feat in earnest on four separate occasions in the past year or so, but all of those rockets either crashed into a drone ship or toppled over and exploded.
Two other SpaceX rocket boosters were equipped to land but never got the chance, since one mission blew up shortly after launch and high seas prevented another landing attempt.
The previous experimental failures didn't inspire much confidence.
In fact, SpaceX said in a press release for one of its launches that "a successful landing is not expected."
Translation: This is really, really hard and we think our rocket will probably explode into bits when it tries to land itself.
That didn't happen, of course, and the incredible consequences can't be ignored.
Each Falcon 9 costs about $60 million. That the company has proven it can now land even part of that hardware — to later clean it up and refuel it for a future launch — is a mind-boggling feat for the space industry.
Friday's successful landing stands to usher in an era of spaceflight that's radically less expensive. Practically speaking, that could mean humanity can ramp up its space exploration ambitions and realistically ponder colonizing the moon, Mars, and other worlds.
Musk has said that a 100-fold cost reduction of access to space is possible, should his rocket-recycling scheme prove as repeatable and reliable as flying an airplane.
The company still has a long way to go satisfy Musk's extraordinary ambition. First, they'll have to demonstrate the rocket stage can be reused without any problems. Then they'll have to land and reuse the rocket — over and over again.
However, Friday's rocket landing is a major step forward for SpaceX in proving that its revolutionary technologies work.
