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SpaceX successfully lands Falcon rocket booster

James Dean
Florida Today
SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launches from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with a Thaicom communications satellite on Friday, May 27, 2016.

MELBOURNE, Fla. — SpaceX landed its third consecutive rocket on a ship in the Atlantic Ocean, during a launch that successfully delivered a commercial communications satellite to orbit.

“The Falcon has landed,” a member of SpaceX’s launch team confirmed about 10 minutes after a 230-foot Falcon 9 rocket's 5:39 p.m. ET blastoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

About 20 minutes later, the satellite owned by Thaicom PLC separated from the rocket's upper stage.

"All looks good," SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said.

The booster is the fourth SpaceX has landed during the six missions the company has launched since December, as it starts to make recovering rockets seem more routine.

This landing and one earlier this month were considered the most difficult, because they were launching satellites on their way to orbits more than 22,000 miles over the equator, requiring more rocket speed.

The 14-story booster dropped more than 70 miles and hit the atmosphere flying at about 4,000 mph.

Descending at that speed, the rocket is scorched with five times more heating than on missions to lower orbits, like SpaceX’s launches of cargo to the International Space Station.

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And the rocket had less fuel to spare to slow its fall.

But for the second time this month, the Falcon booster performed a series of engine firings to brake its approach to an unpiloted "drone ship" floating more than 400 miles down range.

The stage deployed four landing legs and touched down softly on the deck of a football field-sized ship, again prompting cheers from employees gathered at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

SpaceX will secure the rocket before sailing it back to Port Canaveral for inspections within a few days.

Eventually it will join the three other singed but intact boosters stored in a hangar at Kennedy Space Center. The hangar can only hold one more booster.

The experimental landings are part of SpaceX's goal to lower launch costs by recovering and then re-flying rockets.

SpaceX hopes to do that for the first time later this year, re-flying a booster landed in April.

But the booster that landed on May 6 suffered the most damage yet from its "hotter and faster" return, raising doubts about its future flight-worthiness.

For reusability to pay off, SpaceX must recover most of its rockets and turn them around for additional flights with minimum refurbishment.

Musk says he hopes to achieve aircraft-like operations, where teams need only to hose a rocket down and refuel it.

Each returned booster offers engineers another opportunity to see what worked well and what didn't, potentially leading to improvement's in the rocket's design.

Follow James Dean on Twitter: @flatoday_jdeanand

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