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SpaceX Launches Falcon 9 Rocket for the First Time After September’s Launchpad Explosion

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After four and a half months, SpaceX finally celebrated the first launch of its Falcon 9 rocket on Saturday, Jan.14.

According to The Verge, Falcon 9 was previously grounded in September 1 after one of the rockets exploded into a fireball during a routine launchpad test. But finally, the company was able to successfully launch Falcon 9 rockets and landed five of their boosters.

The booster launched from Vandenberg, California on January 14, and pushed a second stage rocket toward space which aims to help deliver new Iridium communications satellites into orbit around Earth at once, reported Business Insider.

The company's flawless launch is more than enough for SpaceX to celebrate after the rough time they went through in 2016 which Elon Musk, SpaceX founder and tech entrepreneur referred to as "the most difficult and complex failure" in the entire history of his company.

However, this is not an end to Musk and his company's mission because this is said to be just the first one of a total of 70 launches SpaceX aims to complete in the next coming years. The overall mission is expected to cost an estimated amount of $10 billion. Under an agreement with NASA, the company is also looking at and working on launching its first human passengers into space in 2018 aboard the Dragon capsule.

SpaceX is currently the only company that launches payloads into orbit and rescue sections of their rockets. They aim to prove that these orbital rocket boosters that can fall back into the Earth can still be reused in order to reduce the cost of access to space. Falcon 9 is specifically designed to transport satellites and the Dragon spacecraft safely into orbit.

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