After a few years of studies and tests, Elon Musk’s company managed for the first time to softly land a first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket in December 2015.
SALVADOR NOGUEIRA – In the space of a decade, the recovery of rocket stages has gone from impossible dream to everyday reality, courtesy of American company SpaceX.
After a few years of studies and tests, Elon Musk’s company managed for the first time to softly land a first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket in December 2015. In a short time, the innovation gave it a gigantic lead ahead of all the competition – which took a while to realize that it would have difficulty competing for the launch market without similar efforts and is only now beginning to move to make up for lost time.
At first glance it’s hard to understand why it took so long to happen, considering rockets have been launching into orbit since 1957 and the basic technology behind them has changed relatively little since then.
Two major taboos hindered this progress for decades: one technological, which required the controlled fall of the rocket stage after carrying out its work on ascent, so that it could be recovered; and another economic one, in which recovering rockets to relaunch them, with all the cost of rescue and reconditioning, made more sense than merely building others and maintaining disposable use.
SpaceX changed the rules of the game in both aspects. In terms of technology, it has focused on equipping its launchers with sensors and devices capable of guiding what is essentially a building – the Falcon 9’s first stage is 40 m high and 3.7 m wide; The first stage of Starship, the largest rocket ever built, is 70 m high by 9 m wide – to a precisely specified point on the planet’s surface.
None of this would be possible without the computing power that has emerged only in recent times, in which the machine reads sensor data (precisely identifying acceleration, displacement, attitude) and appropriately activates auxiliary thrusters or rotates grids with an aerodynamic effect, with adjustments ultra-precise, in order to allow the “building” to descend vertically in the right place and, when approaching the ground, ignite the engines at the exact time with the exact power so that the speed of fall reaches zero at the instant of arrival to the ground.
They look like scenes straight out of Flash Gordon, pure science fiction, until we see Falcon 9 do it again, and again, and again.
This, however, is only part of the story. The other part is the historic accommodation of the space industry, after decades of “common sense” suggesting that rockets are destined to be disposable, by their very nature and the level of demand we have for them.
They are extremely expensive vehicles to build and operate in a completely counterintuitive way. Giants destined to be almost completely filled with fuel, with only a small portion of the mass allocated to the payload you want to take into space.
In this context, it is difficult to imagine the willingness not to spend all the fuel on the ascent, leaving part of it for the return maneuvers. Furthermore, the stage system makes it possible to discard dead weight during the journey, to maximize the transport capacity to orbit, using every last drop of propellant to launch the spacecraft at the desired speed.
Making a reusable rocket involves sacrificing payload capacity. It’s not always viable, even for SpaceX. When using its Falcon Heavy to launch NASA’s Europa Clipper probe to Jupiter, the demand on the vehicle was so great that the company had to launch it in “disposable” mode, using every drop of fuel to provide the required speed. to the spacecraft.
With this logic that rockets are very expensive and do their job better when they are disposable, the industry has accommodated itself to the idea that space is an arena only for large customers, whether governments or large companies. In such an ecosystem, there is relatively modest demand for annual launches and a reusable vehicle, while practical, would make little sense.
SpaceX subverted this logic by creating its own demand – the Starlink satellite constellation, until the other day an unthinkable venture, opened a new branch of space exploration, with the provision of broadband internet and low latency. To put it into orbit, SpaceX would need hundreds of launches – and in this context, reuse pays off. It is no coincidence that the company now makes more than a hundred launches a year, most of them to serve Starlink, and puts more payload into space than the rest of the world combined.
Launch costs, with this frequency of flights, have plummeted. And they tend to fall even further with Starship, which promises to be 100% reusable. With the Falcon 9, only the first stage is recovered. On Starship, both stages will be able to fly multiple times, with little maintenance work.
Competition today is at a crossroads. Some companies, such as the American Blue Origin (by Jeff Bezos) and the New Zealand Rocket Lab (by Peter Beck), are already beginning to explore reusable first stages (technically, Blue Origin was the first to use one, even before SpaceX, with the New Shepard, but this is only intended for suborbital flight, a lesser challenge than that faced by orbital range vehicles).
Others, such as the European Arianespace and the American ULA, with their new launchers (Ariane 6 and Vulcan made their first flight in 2024), continue to invest in largely disposable models, sufficient to meet government demands directed at them. It’s hard to imagine that they won’t have to change this philosophy in the coming years. And even those who have already changed, like many Chinese startups, will still have a long way to go before reaching the proficiency of SpaceX, which currently remains hegemonic in the space launch sector.
