published Mar 30th 2017, 5:37 pm, by Dana Hull

(Bloomberg) —
Space Exploration Technologies Corp. re-flew a rocket that had previously been in orbit for the first time ever, a significant milestone in Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk’s mission to employ reusability as a means to reducing the cost of spaceflight.

A Falcon 9 rocket carrying a customer’s communications satellite rumbled aloft Thursday from a NASA space center in Florida, then stuck the landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean, a livestream of the mission on SpaceX’s website showed. The spacecraft carried a communications satellite from Luxembourg’s SES SA that will provide coverage to Latin America.

Much of the expense of space travel lies in building engines, capsules and other equipment only to be used once and then discarded. Billionaires including Musk and Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos are racing to make rocket reusability — once derided as a crazy idea — into a reality that will dramatically reduce costs.

Closely-held SpaceX has built the Falcon 9 as well as the rocket’s Merlin engines in-house, wagering this will better enable constant improvements and tighter collaboration between design and manufacturing.

The rocket SpaceX re-flew Thursday first took off and landed successfully on an unmanned drone ship bobbing in the Atlantic in April 2016. The company has recovered eight rockets in total, three by land and five by sea.

Recovering and refurbishing the used rocket booster that flew Thursday took SpaceX roughly four months, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said earlier this month. Eventually, that turnaround time will drop to a single day as the company aims to refly rockets much in the way airplanes operate today.

SpaceX has successfully launched four rockets this year and aims to fly 20 to 24 missions in 2017. The Hawthorne, California-based company has contracts with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration valued at $4.2 billion to resupply the International Space Station using its unmanned Dragon spacecraft and later ferry astronauts there with a version capable of carrying crews.

Musk announced last month that SpaceX plans to send two private citizens who paid “significant deposits” on a week-long flight circling the moon in late 2018. The chief executive officer of Tesla Inc. founded SpaceX 15 years ago with the goal of one day creating a human colony on Mars.

SES, which has flown with SpaceX twice before, was the first commercial satellite operator to launch with the company back in 2013.

To contact the reporter on this story: Dana Hull in San Francisco at dhull12@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Craig Trudell at ctrudell1@bloomberg.net Brendan Case

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