SpaceX celebrates its first West Coast rocket booster landing

Catherine Garcia, The Week US's avatar
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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.

This was the company's 44th successful launch in a row, and the first time SpaceX tried a landing at Vandenberg.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US
Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.