SpaceX Falcon 9 Performs It's First Successful Droneship Landing

SpaceX first successful droneship landing - Image credit: SpaceX

On 8 April 2016, SpaceX successfully landed a Falcon 9 first-stage on it's autonomous droneship Of Course I Still Love You.

Here is what that looked like:

From last year, but still my favorite video of the Falcon 9 rocket booster returning from space to land on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Aug 27, 2017 at 11:33am PDT

After performing the the first successful Falcon 9 landing on solid ground in December 2015, four earlier droneship attempts had been made that were unsuccesful.

The sordid history of how the @SpaceX Falcon 9, the first fully reusable, orbit-class booster rocket, eventually managed to land in one piece and stay that way ... maybe Falcon realized it still loved us or finally read the instructions...

A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Sep 14, 2017 at 12:21am PDT

The landing occured about 300 kilometers (190 miles) off the Florida coastline.