Watch the SpaceX landing in glorious 360 vision

Saturday, April 30, 2016, 12:23 PM - Elon Musk, mastermind behind private spaceship company SpaceX, moved us a little deeper into the future earlier in April, with the successful landing of a Falcon 9 rocket on an ocean barge.

Up until that point, the idea of a rocket taking off and eventually landing intact was the stuff of classic pulp science fiction, and indeed, four of Musk's earlier efforts to land a rocket on a barge ended in explosive failure.

But on April 8, after successfully launching a Dragon cargo capsule toward the International Space Station, the Falcon 9 rocket landed on a remote-controlled barge. 

And if you missed it, SpaceX has a treat for you on its YouTube channel:

It's a bona-fide 360 view of the entire landing process (it lands ever-so-slightly off centre of the target), and you can drag the video in every direction with your mouse.

Though this is the first successful landing on a barge, SpaceX successfully landed a rocket safely in Florida in 2015, according to Mashable.

Aside from being amazing to look at, this is a huge development for space travel. Aside from the space shuttle, which was decommissioned in 2011, every spacecraft sent into space was single-use. And even the famous orbiters, though themselves reusable, were blasted into space atop single-use rockets.

Even run-of-the-mill supply missions to the ISS use single-use rockets, so if SpaceX and other contractors can refine a way to reuse those rockets, it could significantly cut down the cost of space travel.

SOURCE: Mashable