SpaceX made history Monday night when it successfully launched a Falcon 9 rocket into orbit, deployed 11 satellites, and then brought the 15-story booster back to Earth for a soft, vertical landing just six miles from where it took off at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

It marks the first time billionaire Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, has attempted to land a rocket on land and the first ever successful attempt to recover a rocket from an orbital flight, NBC News reports. 

As the rocket came to rest on its landing pad, a SpaceX webcast commentator confirmed, “The Falcon has landed,” drawing an eruption of applause from those gathered at the based private space flight company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, California.