Its been a busy week at SpaceX, with the company passing milestones for its manned space program, completing a test flight of its precision landing system and welcoming its latest Dragon back home from orbit.

The California company is finished with the first three performance milestones set out by NASA for the agencys Commercial Crew Integrated Capability program. The CCiCap initiative is similar to the commercial cargo development program SpaceX finished earlier this year, but instead the program is designed for carrying crew to low Earth orbit.

Right now the only way for NASA to send astronauts to the ISS is via the Russian Soyuz. From the beginning, SpaceX has designed both the Falcon 9 booster rocket and the Dragon spacecraft to be capable of manned space flight. And last week the company presented NASA with its plans for an integrated systems requirements review, the third milestone for the CCiCap program.

These initial milestones are just the beginning of a very exciting endeavor with SpaceX, said Ed Mango, NASAs Commercial Crew Program manager. We expect to see significant progress from our three CCiCap partners in a fairly short amount of time.

The two other companies working with NASA on the CCiCap are Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corporation.

Eventually SpaceX wants to employ a fully reusable space launch system. Currently, the Falcon 9 booster rocket isnt put back into service after splashing down in the Atlantic at the end of the first stage. The company has pointed out in the past that airlines dont throw away the airplane after every flight, and it believes one of most important achievements to greatly reducing the cost of orbital flight is to be able to reuse as much of the vehicle as possible after a launch.

In the future SpaceX plans to use rocket engines to allow the Falcon 9 to return to Earth in a controlled flight, with a precision landing at a specified landing site. On Saturday SpaceX founder Elon Musk sent out a video showing the latest (short) flight testing the companys precision landing rocket.

First flight of 10 story tall Grasshopper rocket using closed loop thrust vector & throttle control, Musk tweeted.

Similar to the previous Grasshopper flight, the rocket lifts off the pad for a short flight and returns safely to the ground. While the flight might not look like much, a controlled landing from even a low height as seen in the video is no easy task. The closed loop thrust vector and throttle are part of the automated controls for the Grasshopper. The Falcon 9 and Dragon both use automated controls for all phases of flight (with manual override capabilities) including the final docking with the ISS.

The Grasshopper is a suborbital test vehicle with a wider, landing gear structure at its base to allow for vertical take off and landing capability. Eventually the landing gear is expected to fold up flush with the first stage during flight and be extended again for landing.

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SpaceX Tests Precision Landing Rocket