As communiqués go, it was both terse and seemingly routine: "The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that helped power the Dragon CRS-8 spacecraft into orbit successfully touched down on the autonomous spaceport drone ship (ASDS) out in the Atlantic Ocean today, April 8th 2016. This was the first attempt where the rocket remained intact, it will now be secured to deck and towed back to port for offload and examination ahead of potential reuse."

What the video above shows, though, is the rather more exciting sight of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket landing back on earth – well, planet earth – but not on land. Instead, it settles down with pinpoint precision on a drone ship in the ocean named, in a tribute to the late Iain Banks's sci-fi novels, "Of Course I Still Love You".

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Why is this important? For one thing, this was the first successful attempt after four failures by Elon Musk's company to land the rocket on a floating ship instead of solid land. It's a lot tougher to achieve this on a landing deck out at sea, since it isn't as steady and immovable as solid land. But landing in this manner needs a lot less fuel, and for SpaceX to offer its services commercially, this was a crucial proof of concept.

So, while the second stage of the rocket carried on to the International Space Centre with the Dragon spacecraft, the first stage was guided through a series of manoeuvres before it could land successfully – which the engineers and scientists managing the process were not fully certain of.

The primary objective of the mission is to deliver, via the Dragon spacecraft, some interesting material to the International Space Centre. As this Quartz report says: "Among its cargo will be fungi and live mice for experiments, along with materials for growing veggies in space. But the craft will also ferry a privately-built expandable habitat that will become five times larger than its compressed size in about 45 minutes. "

Here's a longer video giving the details of the mission.