SpaceX skyter snart opp den første gjenbrukte raketten - Curt Lewis

Elon Musk's SpaceX on brink of `Wright Brothers moment' with reused rocket

If the rocket that Elon Musk's SpaceX expects to launch this week looks familiar, that's because it is.

The Falcon 9 rocket scheduled to take off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, has flown before, marking the first time Space Exploration Technologies will reuse one of the 14-story-tall boosters it recovered from past missions. The reused rocket will ferry a communications satellite into orbit for Luxembourg-based SES, SpaceX's first commercial customer, and signals a leap forward in Musk's 15-year-quest to drive down launch costs and eventually create a human colony on Mars.

"This is a Wright Brothers moment for space," said Phil Larson, a former space-policy adviser to President Barack Obama who worked for SpaceX and is now at the University of Colorado. "It's as important as the first plane taking off and landing and taking off again."