Falcon 9
Falcon 9 makes the first land landing of an orbital-class first stage
View full image ↗ How was this image made?
The creative brief sent to the image model. These are instructions, not a record of what actually happened.
Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Nine minutes after liftoff the booster was standing upright about six miles from where it had launched, while the upper stage carried on and released 11 satellites.
Nine minutes from launch pad to landing pad
SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral at 8:29 p.m. EST on 21 December 2015, carrying 11 ORBCOMM OG2 communications satellites. In UTC — the date usually listed for the flight — it was already 22 December.
At 8:38 p.m. EST, nine minutes after liftoff, the rocket's first stage landed vertically at Landing Zone 1 on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, roughly six miles from the pad it had left. It was the first such recovery of an orbital-class first stage following an orbital launch.
The satellites were still the actual mission
The landing was a secondary test objective. The primary work belonged to the upper stage, which continued on and deployed all 11 ORBCOMM satellites into their intended insertion orbits.
Landing Zone 1 was the former Launch Complex 13. The stage that came down there had flown a suborbital trajectory: "orbital-class" describes the launch vehicle and the mission, not the path the booster itself took.
Recovered, but not yet reused
By the end of the mission all 11 satellites were in nominal orbits and an intact Falcon 9 first stage stood at Landing Zone 1. The stage had been recovered; it had not demonstrated reflight, and it would never fly again.
Blue Origin had landed its New Shepard the previous month, but New Shepard was a suborbital vehicle — the orbital-launch qualification is what this landing added. Falcon 9's first successful drone-ship landing came later, on 8 April 2016.
Operational reusability meant inspection, refurbishment and reflight, a cycle SpaceX first completed with booster B1021 in March 2017.
Sources
Researched 23 Aug 2026 7 sources 2 audit passes Date corrected
How this was checked
Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →
Date corrected. The research places this at 2015-12-21.
What the sources leave uncertain
- The listed 22 December date is correct in UTC, but the launch and landing occurred on the evening of 21 December at Cape Canaveral. Because the event is tied to a Florida location, 2015-12-21 is the clearest civil date.
- “Orbital-class” describes the launch vehicle and mission. The recovered first stage itself followed a suborbital trajectory and did not enter orbit.