SpaceX's Grasshopper Hits Milestone After Performing Successful Sideways Hop [VIDEO]

SpaceX's Grasshopper hit another milestone this week when it completed a "divert" test, the company announced Wednesday.

In all, the 10-story tall space vehicle flew to an altitude of 250 meters and completed a 100 meter lateral maneuver before returning safely to the ground once more.

In doing so, a company statement says, the vehicle successfully performed "more aggressive steering maneuvers than have been attempted in previous flights."

Diverts like the one the vehicle performed are important part, the statement continued, in the trajectory needed "in order to land the rocket precisely back at the launch site after reentering from space at hypersonic velocity."

In early July, the prototype reached a new height of 325 meters, or roughly the height of the Chrysler Building in New York City, employing its full navigation sensor suite in the process for the first time.

These and other experiments carried out by Grasshopper represent a herculean effort by the company helmed by PayPal and Tesla's co-founder Elon Musk to render space travel more affordable -- of which a reusable rocket is considered a key player.

However, even this does not represent the end goal for the visionary who founded the company in 2002 with the hope of colonizing other planets.

The company first made history in 2010 when it became the only private company to return a spacecraft from low-Earth orbit. Then, in 2012, the company once again made headlines when its Dragon spacecraft successfully transported payload to the International Space Station (ISS), "a technically challenging feat previously accomplished only by governments," the site explains.

The company currently boasts a $1.6 billion contract with NASA to fly at least 10 more cargo resupply missions to the ISS for a total of 12. Furthermore, the company says it is currently under a $440 million contract to perform the modifications to the Dragon capsule in order to render it capable of transporting crew members to and from the orbiting lab.