The Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off at 10:26 p.m. PT from Cape Canaveral Air, Fla., and carry the JCSAT-16 satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket launched a satellite for a Japanese communication company tonight, and then made a bull's-eye landing on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

Less than 10 minutes after liftoff, the first stage of the Falcon 9 deployed four landing legs and touched down on the football field-sized deck of an unpiloted parked roughly 400 miles offshore.

"Given this mission's GTO destination, the first stage will be subject to extreme velocities and re-entry heating, making a successful landing challenging", SpaceX representatives wrote in a pre-launch JCSAT-16 press kit.

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The communications satellite will help provide more stable satellite services for video distribution and data transfer communications in Asia, Russia, Oceania, Middle East and North America.

The next step is to re-fly a used rocket, something Musk has said he expects to happen by this fall. In that regard, it's not so much landing on a droneship that makes the GTO mission hard, but the fact that the Falcon 9 will not have the necessary amount of fuel to minimize its speed as it heads back towards Earth to land on a droneship. Sometimes the rocket came in too hot, didn't have enough hydraulic fluid left to control its descent, or one of the landing legs didn't lock properly causing the rocket to tip over. About 18 minutes later, the second stage engine re-ignited for a short one-minute burn to finish the job, releasing JCSAT-16 into a highly elliptical orbit.

SpaceX's rocket landings, while dramatic, have all been secondary objectives; the main goal of each mission has always been to get the payload to orbit. SpaceX test-fired a launched and landed booster last month.

JCSAT-16 was a satellite that was set as a backup for other JSAT satellites now in orbit.