SpaceX nails rocket landing

The private spaceflight company landed its Falcon 9 rocket for the sixth time in the last eight months early Sunday morning, pulling off the feat during the successful launch of the JCSAT-16 commercial communications satellite. The two-stage Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 1:26 a.m. EDT Sunday, carrying JCSAT-16 toward a distant geosynchronous transfer orbit (GTO). Less than 9 minutes later, the rocket's first stage came back for a pinpoint landing on the deck of a robotic ship called Of Course I Still Love You, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. A textbook touchdown had been anything but guaranteed. "Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging," SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.