Reusable rockets
A booster lands upright, and the cost of reaching orbit falls sharply.
- When
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
SpaceX lands an orbital-class first stage in December 2015 and reflies one in 2017. Falcon 9 boosters have since flown twenty or more times each, cutting launch costs by roughly an order of magnitude and enabling satellite constellations of tens of thousands of units. That has transformed both communications and astronomy, the latter unwillingly — satellite trails now contaminate a significant fraction of ground-based observations.