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Reusable rocketry is creeping higher and higher into the atmosphere. Grasshopper, the SpaceX rocket that can take off into the sky and then steer itself back to its launch pad, reached an altitude of 325 meters (just more than 1000 feet) during a test this weekend at a SpaceX launch site in Texas, seen here. The rocket's previous altitude record was about 840 feet.

SpaceX has been testing the hopping rocket since last year. It's part of founder Elon Musk's vision of a reusable rocket system in which the rocket stages would not be lost after each use, but instead would fly back home and land so they could be used again, a breakthrough with the potential to reduce drastically the cost of launches. In a recent interview with PopMech, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said the company was about a year away from being able to recover rocket stages and perhaps two to three years away from rapid reusability of its rockets.

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