SpaceX Falcon 9's recycled first stage lands on drone ship after launch

The launch was the first attempt by SpaceX at sending the well-known Falcon 9 rocket back to space — and since, it's already been there back in April 2016, when it delivered necessary supplies to the crew of the International Space Station (ISS), it's been labeled as "recycled." A Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX — formally Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, based in Hawthorne, Calif. — lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to deposit the payload, a telecommunications satellite that will service Latin America, in the proper orbit. The launch will mark the first time SpaceX -- the private space venture headed by Tesla (TSLA) CEO Elon Musk -- will use a first-stage rocket booster that was previously flown to space and returned safely to Earth. Martin Halliwell, chief technology officer at SES has refused to discuss the cost of the Falcon 9 flight, however he stressed that the launch will be historic. This is a huge accomplishment because it already did this once before – with the same rocket, on the same barge, when it landed a year ago following a successful launch during a resupply mission to the International Space Station. It could conceivably launch again, since it returned in one piece, landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic.
SpaceX successfully places the SES-10 telecommunications satellite on a geostationary transfer orbit. The event is notable because of the implied economic cost savings of reusing, for the first time, a used Falcon 9 first stage which had previously been recovered. That first stage had previously launched a Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station and landed on an autonomous drone ship during the CRS-8 mission.