Landing Zone 1, Cape Canaveral

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The concrete circle where orbital-class reuse was first demonstrated. Built on the site of the former Launch Complex 13, it received the Falcon 9 first stage from the Orbcomm OG2 mission on 21 December 2015 — the first time a booster that had helped place a payload in orbit was flown back and landed intact. The landing is a boostback burn, an entry burn to slow the stage through the densest air, and a single-engine landing burn timed so the vehicle reaches zero velocity at zero altitude. Because the pad sits a few kilometres from the launch complexes, a booster can be back on the Cape within about ten minutes of lifting off. The site matters to the space economy out of proportion to its size: before it, every orbital launch destroyed its most expensive component, and the possibility that this need not be so had been asserted for decades without being shown.