10 years of reusable rockets

Ben Evans charts the rise of multi-flight spacecraft, the tech revolution that's transforming our access to space

- Ben Evans charts the rise of multi-flight spacecraft, the tech revolution that's transforming our access to space

On the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and Jack Northrop Avenue in Hawthorne, California, stands an unlikely monument - a modern-day obelisk that bears silent witness to a space revolution. Fourteen storeys tall and partially screened by toughened glass, this SpaceX Falcon 9 was the first orbital-class rocket to launch into space and then return to land intact. Ten years ago, it inspired millions. Today, it inspires even more.

Its nine Merlin engines gleam in the California sunlight. Four aluminium grid fins, like great mechanised ears, helped guide this behemoth back from space to alight on a Cape Canaveral landing pad. And four extendable landing legs, spanning 18 metres (60ft) from tip to tip, recall the night of 21 December 2015, when it blasted into space, flipped around in mid-flight and roared safely home.

Until that night, 'orbital-class' rockets were discarded after every mission – a lack of reusability that kept the cost of space travel eye-wateringly high. After all, scrapping a brand-new airliner to build a new one after each flight would make air travel prohibitively expensive. But rockets are not airliners. They attain greater energies, reach immense speeds and must withstand tremendous thermal, aerodynamic and structural loads. That demands high levels of reliability and makes them hard to inexpensively reuse.

From Shuttles to SpaceX

Rocket reusability is not new. NASA's partially reusable Space Shuttle flew 135 times between 1981 and 2011. Its fleet of five reusable orbiters - Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour - completed multiple missions into low Earth orbit, and its solid-fuelled rocket boosters parachuted into the ocean after each launch and were used again. Only the Shuttle's giant external fuel tank was discarded on each flight.