The video above shows the landing of the twin boosters of SpaceX‘s  Falcon Heavy from the launch on 6 February 2018. For me, this was the most interesting part. Reusable boosters will reduce the costs of space flights by a huge factor. The Tesla Roadster and the Starman mannequin in space may be good for PR.

But the science involved there is not new. Humans have put objects into space for some decades now. The Falcon Heavy simply has a much larger payload capacity in that regard.

The new thing is being able to reuse the boosters. This means that the booster re-entry speed had to be controlled so the booster surface would not burn on re-entry. Also, the trajectory of the boosters had to be controlled so that they could land as depicted in the video on the pads at the base. These required no mean feats of engineering.

For me, this is the exciting part. It promises that space travel will become significantly cheaper in the years ahead. And perhaps the colonization of Mars is not as distant a dream as once thought – perhaps not even a dream now.