DUSHANBE, December 23, 2015, Asia-Plus -- US company SpaceX has successfully landed an unmanned rocket upright, after sending 11 satellites into orbit.

BBC reports the Falcon-9 craft touched down late on Monday night, about 10 kilometers from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It is not the first spacecraft to land a booster vertically; that feat was claimed by the much smaller New Shepard rocket in Texas last month.

Nonetheless the Falcon-9 flight, which also went twice as high as New Shepard, is a milestone towards reusing rockets.

SpaceX aims to slash the cost of private space operations with such reusable components - but the company has not launched a rocket since one exploded in June.

On that occasion an unmanned Falcon-9 broke apart in flames minutes after lifting off from Cape Canaveral, with debris tumbling out of the sky into the Atlantic Ocean.

The rocket, which had 18 straight successes prior to the fateful flight, was in the process of sending a cargo ship to the International Space Station (ISS).

SpaceX has a $1.6bn contract with NASA to send supplies to the ISS.

On Monday night, local time, the upgraded 23-storey-tall rocket reportedly took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station with the main stage returning about 10 minutes later to a landing site about 9.65 kilometers south of the launch pad.

The flawless launch on Monday is a major success for privately-owned Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, the California-based company set up and run by high-tech entrepreneur Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk has said the ability to return its rockets to Earth so they can be reused and reflown would hugely reduce his company''s operational costs in the growing but highly competitive private space launch industry.

SpaceX is aiming to revolutionize the rocket industry, which up until now has lost millions of dollars in discarded machinery and valuable rocket parts after each launch.

According to TechCrunch , which is a leading technology media property, Falcon 9 is a serious rocket, capable of reaching 200 kilometers up thanks to the 1.5 million pounds of thrust produced by its 9 engines.  It’s designed to take serious payloads into serious orbit.

SpaceX previously attempted to land a Falcon 9 on a robotic barge.  This time around, the company opted for terra firma and a massive concrete landing pad.

Landing a Falcon 9 rocket was a long time coming for SpaceX. The company used smaller test rockets called the Grasshopper to test the system. Gradually, over several launches, the smaller rocket reached new heights from several hundred feet to sub-orbit flight before returning to Earth and landing vertically.

The Falcon 9 is a two-stage rocket. Only the large, booster stage landed today. The remaining capsule contains the payload, which will not be reused.

This was the sixth launch of a Falcon 9 rocket in 2015.