A beautiful image displaying a shimmering 14-story rocket, in a cloud of fire and smoke, touching down at Cape Canaveral's Landing Zone 1 gently just minutes after payload delivery into space, could one day prove iconic.

The smooth landing resulted into bouts of delirium at Elon Musk's aerospace startup SpaceX. The good news is that the successful voyage and comeback of a functional Falcon 9 booster was one of the key ambitions goals of the company. And on Monday, its outstanding success, following 3 earlier failures, has suggested that the space business is probably on the verge of a breakthrough.

For so many years, taking anything into space has demanded a huge amount of money and a lot of waste. Generally, after delivering payloads, rockets burn up and plunk unceremoniously in the ocean, which means they can’t be used again.

The spacefaring’s future, both civic and commercial, relies on lowering the price of those launches. Musk’s estimation is that the fully reusable rockets may cut expenses by a factor of 100.

That could give way to some exciting business opportunities. In the last few years, satellites have gotten smaller and reasonable, and with it companies have started using them in businesses ranging from insurance to agriculture to weather forecasting.

Falcon 9 stuck its landing recently, and had just deposited 11 satellites into orbit for Orbcomm, using them in machine- to-machine communications. If putting all that equipment into orbit gets very cheaper, as envisioned by Musk, it may revolutionize the space economy.