Drone’s view of Sunday’s SpaceX rocket landing

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster accomplished a delicate maneuver after a glowing predawn launch from Cape Canaveral on Saturday, autonomously navigating its away to a modified barge the size of a football field hidden in darkness beneath a blanket of low clouds, before it crashed and broke apart.

In the last few months, teams of SpaceX engineers working on the flat coastal plains of South Texas and in a nondescript industrial yard on Florida’s Space Coast have been building two futuristic-looking stainless steel rockets — or Starships — prototypes for a reusable vehicle the company claims could one day ferry people to Mars.

Two communications satellites blasted off Sunday aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off more than a half-year of novel maneuvers in orbit using plasma drive engines to position the spacecraft 22,300 miles above Earth and link the Americas, Europe, Africa and the Middle East.