Thank you for this. National news is only showing the lift off ( yawn ) for this story. Looks like they also worked out and eliminated the controlled crash 80s video game landing that most rockets had in these tests.
They have now landed three in a row on the barge, so they have gotten that under control really fast. The next step of course is to reuse the rocket on another launch, which they said will happen later this year. Now that they have a sample of rockets that survived, they can examine them and make design changes if they need to, to make them more reusable. By next year, it may be common to have reused first stages.
remember the video game Lunar Lander?
a very early vector graphic arcade machine.
it was tough trying to land on those tiny 100 point spots...