SpaceX celebrates its first West Coast rocket booster landing

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
(Image credit: David McNew/Getty Images)

In a first for SpaceX, the company landed a first-stage booster at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California Sunday night, after launching an Argentine observation satellite.

Since December 2015, SpaceX has successfully landed 11 Falcon 9 boosters at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, but this was the first time the company landed a booster on the West Coast. In order to make launches less expensive, SpaceX lands first-stage boosters and then refurbishes them; a launch on a new Falcon 9 rocket costs $62 million, the Los Angeles Times reports.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.