Drone Shoots Epic Footage of SpaceX Rocket Launch and Controlled Landing

Elon Musk's space-faring company SpaceX has released the first test footage of its Falcon 9 Reusable (F9R) taking off, and making a controlled landing at the company's rocket-development facility in Texas.

The epic video gives us a 360-degree aerial view of the feat, thanks to the unique perspective of a camera-equipped drone.

The video, above, opens with the hexacopter drone already airborne, and swooping in to get a close-up view of the rocket as it begins to take off. After reaching a height of 250 meters (about 820 feet), the rocket hovers and then returns to earth.

The importance of the successful test was highlighted by the fact that Musk interrupted his Twitter stream of updates on the Friday SpaceX launch bound for the International Space Station to direct everyone's attention to the test footage.

Hexacopter drone vid of 1st F9 rocket booster takeoff & landing w flight design legs http://t.co/FhZX3afK1a
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) 18 April 2014

The SpaceX controlled-descent tests are designed to aid the company in its efforts to make reusable rockets the norm, and therefore significantly bring down the cost of future space travel.

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