Although the famous Carrington Event of 1859 is often described as the first major space weather event to affect technology, earlier incidents did occur. Historical records show that telegraph systems were disrupted by geomagnetic storms as early as the late 1840s.
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The winners of the first-ever Neil Armstrong Space Prize just got their hardware.
Those awardees — the people who developed and mastered the famous landing capability of SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket — were announced in April. But they didn't actually receive the prize until Tuesday night (Sept. 15), when it was bestowed during a ceremony at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C.
And it was richly deserved, according to Purdue University, which created the international award and named it after perhaps its most famous alumnus. (Purdue is known as the "cradle of astronauts," because 30 of its graduates have flown in space or been selected as NASA astronaut candidates.)
"Neil Armstrong's achievement rested on extraordinary engineering, teamwork and the courage to attempt what had never been done before," Mark Lundstrom, the John A. Edwardson Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue, said in a statement on Tuesday.
"The Falcon 9 Booster Landing Team carries that spirit forward," he added. "By making rocket reuse practical at unprecedented scale, they changed the economics of spaceflight and opened new possibilities for science, exploration and commerce. It is especially fitting that they are the first recipients of the Neil Armstrong Space Prize."
Purdue wants the annual prize to become a sort of Nobel for space science and exploration. The inaugural honorees are five SpaceX employees, who represent the much larger Falcon 9 landing team:
The two-stage Falcon 9 debuted in June 2010. The rocket was always envisioned to have a reusable first stage, though making that happen took a while.
"On a simple hand calc, I thought, 'Oh, this would work,'" said Kuwata, who joined SpaceX in 2012.
"But then the difficult part is going from this hand calculation to the reality, and there are a lot of nuances that we learned on the way," he told Space.com. "And on paper, I think it would have been done in like six months. But it took like three, four years to actually get it to work."
The milestone moment occurred on Dec. 21, 2015, on the 20th Falcon 9 flight to date: The rocket's first stage came back to Earth for its first-ever vertical touchdown, landing at Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (now known as Cape Canaveral Space Force Station) after sending 11 satellites to orbit for the company Orbcomm.
The Falcon 9 ticked another big box on April 8, 2016, acing a touchdown on a SpaceX "drone ship" stationed in the Atlantic Ocean.
These eye-popping sights have now become commonplace; to date, SpaceX has landed boosters more than 650 times during orbital missions. And these rockets don't stay on the ground for long. Six different Falcon 9 first stages now have more than 30 launches and landings under their belt, led by Booster 1067, which has flown a whopping 37 times.
Such extensive reuse has helped make the Falcon 9 the dominant rocket flying today. In 2025, the vehicle flew 165 missions — about half of the global total — and all of them were successful.
This success has inspired copycats. For example, two different Chinese rockets have landed successfully in the past few months, one of which employs foldable landing legs just like a Falcon 9 first stage.
But the imitation doesn't bother Velazquez.
"I think this is great," he told Space.com. "I mean, we didn't start from scratch, right? If you look at a cross section of our engines and the engines from the '60s, they're all very similar. So we're all kind of cribbing from the same place. But the fact that we are able to advance the bar so that everybody else is landing first stages is just great. I think we all move forward together, and we need more entrants in the field to really have a big kind of spacefaring economy and civilization."
SpaceX is planning to sunset the Falcon 9 in the relatively near future in favor of Starship, the fully reusable megarocket it's developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other exploration tasks.
Starship has flown 13 test flights to date, all of them suborbital. SpaceX has already successfully recovered the giant vehicle's Super Heavy first stage on three occasions, catching the booster with the "chopstick" arms of the launch tower at its Starbase site in South Texas.
Such success follows quite naturally from the experience the company built up with the Falcon 9 (and its cousin the Falcon Heavy). But landing and reflying Starship's upper stage, known as Ship, is a different animal. (Falcon upper stages are expendable.)
"The bigger step change for Starship is the stage two — Ship upper stage — reusability," Kuwata said.
"In Monte Carlo simulations, [Ship landings] work well," he added. "And then we kind of demonstrated that pinpoint landing, precision landing, on the ocean many times. But I feel we will find out more things along the way by trying many times."
"Yeah, the 'trying many times' I think is kind of key," Velazquez said. "And I think we're getting pretty close to to catching a Ship."
On Sept. 16, 1949, the U.S. launched a V-2 rocket with a monkey named Albert III on board.
Albert III was the third monkey the U.S. attempted to launch to space. He was also the third one to be killed on the job. The U.S. precursor to NASA began launching monkeys into space in the 1940s to try to see what might happen to humans in space.
This testing started more than a decade before any humans were launched up there. The monkeys were all given anesthetics and covered with sensors and probes that monitored their vitals. While the other five Alberts that were launched on V-2 rockets were all rhesus monkeys, Albert III was actually a long-tailed macaque. Sadly, Albert III died when his rocket exploded 10 seconds after launch.
The two Alberts who came before him died differently, first by suffocation and then by a parachute that failed to deploy before landing. It wasn't until the Albert VI flew in 1961 that a test monkey survived a test launch. NASA stopped using monkeys for launch testing in the 1980s.
In the late 1940s, the United States was just beginning to gain experience with large rocket and ballistic missile launches using a cache of V-2 rockets (and the German rocket scientists like Werhner von Braun that designed them). And while the U.S. military sought to develop rocket and missile weapons, animal launches like the failed flight of Albert III were aimed studying how the upper atmosphere and cosmic rays could affect living things (like future astronauts).
To do that, the U.S. Air Force formed Project Blossom, a series of V-2 rocket launches out of White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico that included five "biological flights" overseen by the Aero-Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, according to a history by the White Sands Missile Range Museum.
Albert III's launch failed 24.7 seconds after liftoff, with the V-2 rocket flying at a slower speed than expected after liftoff, the museum account states. The rocket suffered an explosion in its tail section 10.7 seconds into the flight, then another one 14 seconds later (likely due to leaks in its alchol fuel system). It reached a maximum altitude of just 3 miles before the failure.
Despite the failure, military scientists took what they learned from Albert III's launch to make design improvements in future tests. There were still failures (the next monkey launch of Albert IV did not succeed), and three of the seven Project Blossom launch tests failed in all.
The first successful monkey launch carried Albert VI (and 11 mice) to suborbital space and back on a new Aerobee rocket on Sept. 20, 1951, NASA has said.
Want more space history? Check out our full On This Day In Space Story archive and watch our On This Day In Space videos on YouTube.
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