When it Comes to Missiles, Don’t Copy Russia and China — Leapfrog Them
Jeff Becker
June 30, 2020
Nearly five years ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 first-stage booster dropped tail first from the night sky, igniting one of its nine liquid oxygen/RP1 engines and softly touching down at a landing zone eight kilometers north of its launch site at the Kennedy Space Center nine minutes after delivering a communications satellite to low-Earth orbit. Everyone in the world could see that rockets designed to prioritize affordability and reusability rather than raw performance were possible. They also promised to put humans in space sustainably by completely transforming the economics of reaching orbit.
A short three months later, another Falcon 9 — serial number B1021 — also landed, this time on a robotic ship hundreds of kilometers from the launch site deep in the Atlantic Ocean. B1021 would fly again less than a year later, marking the first time a first-stage rocket would be used twice for an orbital mission. By 2020, the upgraded Block V versions of the Falcon 9 have re-flown as many as five separate times for orbital missions, and can even be reused for manned missions — an unparalleled series of triumphs in space launch technology.
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