CRS-8

Four drone ship attempts had failed. On 8 April 2016, nine minutes after CRS-8 cleared the pad at Cape Canaveral, the Falcon 9 first stage settled onto the deck of Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic — upright, intact, the engines quiet. It was the first successful drone ship landing, and the first time any organization had recovered a liquid-fuelled orbital booster on a ship at sea.

The Dragon spacecraft carried the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module to the station, a prototype inflatable habitat scheduled for two years of in-orbit testing. Booster B1021 was later chosen for a different milestone: the first orbital-class reflight in the history of rocketry, launching SES-10 in March 2017.