The sight of a SpaceX Falcon 9 booster descending from a great height and landing upright with pinpoint accuracy on a droneship waiting in the ocean never gets old. And the spaceflight company has just done it again.
Minutes after launch from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in NASA’s IMAP (Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe) mission to map the boundaries of the heliosphere (the large bubble created by the solar wind that encapsulates our entire solar system), the first-stage Falcon 9 booster used a combination of re-ignitable engines, aerodynamic control surfaces, thrust vectoring, cold gas thrusters, and navigation systems to land on the Just Read the Instructions droneship waiting off the coast of Florida.
You can watch the descent below:
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on the Just Read the Instructions droneship pic.twitter.com/aFkhZPoePS
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2025
SpaceX recently captured video of another booster landing (this one on land), tracking it all the way home in this spectacular footage:
Just a couple of decades ago, if anyone had suggested attempting such a feat, they would’ve been laughed out of town. But in 2015, SpaceX achieved the landing for the first time and has never looked back.
Landing a first-stage Falcon 9 booster in this way allows SpaceX to reuse the booster multiple times, drastically cutting the cost of space missions and thereby opening up orbital access to way more businesses and organizations. One of SpaceX’s boosters has already flown 30 times, with many others having also flown multiple times, highlighting the company’s ability to reuse its first stage with ease.
SpaceX is now applying what it’s learned from landing the Falcon 9 to its next-gen Starship rocket, the most powerful vehicle ever to fly.
The Elon Musk-led company has already managed to land the first stage of the Starship, called the Super Heavy, though instead of it touching down on the ground, the system uses giant mechanical arms on the launch tower to secure the booster just before landing.
SpaceX is aiming to use the Starship for crew and cargo missions to the moon, and hopefully to Mars, too.