CAPE CANAVERAL, FLORIDA — SpaceX, the company owned by high-tech entrepreneur and billionaire Elon Musk, has for the first time landed vertically an unmanned rocket.

A previous attempt in June ended in failure when one of the company's Falcon 9 rockets exploded after takeoff.

The 68.4-meter-tall upgraded Falcon 9 took off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Monday with 11 Orbcomm satellites on board, the Guardian reported.

Once in space, the booster separated from the Dragon capsule and deployed all of the satellites it was carrying.

The satellites will provide machine-to-machine messaging services on the ground.

The booster reached a distance of 200 kilometers above the Earth and stayed in space for about 10 minutes before heading back to a landing site about 9.65 kilometers south of its launch pad, the BBC reported.

"Welcome back, baby!" Musk wrote on Twitter while on his way to the landing zone.

A standard SpaceX rocket launch costs $61.2 million. According to Bloomberg, Musk estimates that landing rockets upright and making them reusable would cut costs by a hundredfold.

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