6 comments

• Ronaldus Magnus

  September 28, 2025 at 8:01 pm

  About 3 weeks ago, I started watching the almost every other day, every 3 days Falcon 9 launches and first stage landings. On the ocean drone barges, there is a large circle and a bullseye in the center of the circle. Almost every drone ship landing does not simply land inside the circle. It lands in the center of the center of the circle. East Coast, West Coast, it does not matter.

  Tonight’s landing was another bullseye.

  Not bad, not bad at all.
• Jeff Wright

  September 28, 2025 at 9:15 pm

  So, what would a limit be—60 flights? More.

  I wonder if the size of Falcon has hit some kind of sweet spot. Smaller, and maybe re-use isn’t that valuable. Anything larger, and it can be problematic.
• Rockribbed1

  September 29, 2025 at 2:21 am

  I believe Starship development is progressing well. The first super heavy reuse is coming up. Mars is the next signpost ahead.
• Ray Van Dune

  September 29, 2025 at 7:18 am

  If reuse is defined as “relaunched”, booster 14 was reused on flight 9, but was not recovered. There is some justification for this definition, since it did indeed perform its second boost function successfully.
• sippin_bourbon

  September 29, 2025 at 2:08 pm

  Firefly appears to have had an issue with a booster for the next flight.

  Very flamey.
• Edward

  September 30, 2025 at 3:46 pm

  Jeff Wright,
  You wondered “ if the size of Falcon has hit some kind of sweet spot. Smaller, and maybe re-use isn’t that valuable. Anything larger, and it can be problematic.”

  I don’t know about that. Super Heavy is significantly larger but is doing more than just fine, it is landing by being caught by “chopsticks.” Meanwhile, SpaceX is still searching for optimizations for Super Heavy, and that requires going too far and losing test articles by test-to-destruction. One of SpaceX’s philosophies, the best part is no part, requires that parts be removed to the point of failure of the whole unit, giving rise to another philosophy: if you don’t have to add back parts, then you didn’t remove enough of them. In the same way, if you don’t test to destruction, then you don’t know the limits of the design’s abilities. If you don’t test to destruction, you don’t know what is optimal for the general design.*

  If you are comparing Starship’s reentries with the Falcon booster reentry, then your comparison is unfair. Orbital reentry is far more difficult than reentry of a booster. The heat shielding is more intensive for the orbital reentry.

  The number of flights? That is hard to say, and it may depend upon whether you include engine flights. The engines may not last as long as the boy (fuselage?).

  Here at BTB, a decade ago, we had a discussion about the optimal number of reuses of a rocket or its booster, but we had focused on cost, not availability for the next launch. The first reuse saves the cost of building another rocket, but as it is reused more and more, the delta cost becomes much less and the other costs of launch dominate the equation. For instance, between the 99th flight and 100th flight, only 1% of the manufacturing cost is saved. We did not account for the costs of refurbishment, because those were unknown at the time, and many in the rocket industry believed that refurbishment makes rocket reusability uneconomical. Their main evidence was the Space Shuttle and its solid rocket boosters, which were not as economical as had been expected.
  ________________
  * This does not mean that you have the best design or the optimal design. Starship has been designed using certain assumptions and has left out some efficiencies that cannot be redesigned into the concept. Other companies have plenty of room to find more efficiencies and optimizations that are beyond Starship’s capabilities.

  The same holds for the Falcons. As we watch China try to reuse boosters, we could — and maybe should — look for areas in which they have found better efficiencies or optimizations that SpaceX left on the table when they committed to the Falcon design.

  We have already seen several areas in which SpaceX has improved upon the Space Shuttle’s designed-in reusability. The Shuttle had problems with its thermal protection system’s heat shield. The Shuttle’s engines needed more refurbishment between flights than a low cost or quick turnaround system requires. Putting a Shuttle together with its External Tank and Solid Rocket Boosters, then getting it out to the launch pad took a lot of time, too. Starship is still developing its heat shielding, reducing the amount of maintenance needed on the engines, and working out how to get the booster and orbiter back on the launch pad and ready for another flight quickly, perhaps hours. Landing on a runway was an improvement over splashing a capsule in the middle of the ocean, but landing at the launchpad seems to be an even better improvement for rapid turnaround.