Reusable orbital launch

technology

The recovery and reflight of orbital-class launch hardware, achieved operationally for the first time by SpaceX's Falcon 9 first stage. The technique is propulsive: the booster separates, flips, relights a subset of its engines to cancel downrange velocity or to boost back toward the coast, re-enters through its own engine plume, and lands vertically on legs at a coastal pad or on an autonomous drone ship. The first successful landing was on 21 December 2015 at Cape Canaveral; the first reflight of a recovered booster followed on 30 March 2017. What reuse changed is not the physics but the economics of cadence — a recovered booster removes both the cost of a new stage and the production-rate ceiling that limited how often anyone could fly. Payload fairings were subsequently recovered and reflown as well. The limits are equally real: only the first stage and fairing are recovered on Falcon 9, the second stage is expended every flight, and recovery costs performance, so the highest-energy missions still fly expendable. Not a place.

A technology is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.