SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches Telstar 19V satellite and lands on drone ship

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket executed a textbook launch to put the heavy-duty Telstar 19 Vantage telecommunications satellite into orbit tonight and bring back the first-stage booster for an at-sea landing.

The successful mission kicked off what’s expected to be a rapid-fire series of three liftoffs in two weeks’ time.

The recently upgraded Block 5 variant of SpaceX’s workhorse rocket blazed into the night sky from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 10:50 p.m. PT (1:50 a.m. ET Sunday), at the start of a four-hour launch window.

Over the course of eight and a half minutes, the two-stage rocket sent the satellite on the first leg of its journey to a geostationary transfer orbit. While the second stage powered onward, the first-stage booster relit its engines to navigate its way through the night to an autonomous landing ship named “Of Course I Still Love You,” stationed hundreds of miles off the Florida coast in the Atlantic Ocean.

Webcam video showed the rocket’s descent to the deck, and after a break in the video stream, the booster could be seen standing tall. SpaceX workers broke out in cheers back at mission control in Hawthorne, Calif.

A SpaceX recovery team was tasked with fishing the two halves of the Falcon 9’s nose cone out of the Atlantic, in an experiment aimed at advancing the company’s plans to save millions of dollars by reusing the nose cone, or fairing, as well as the booster.