The Day I Became a Believer
10 years ago, reusable space vehicles stopped being just a dream
It has been a whole decade now since the 20th flight of Falcon 9, launching 11 satellites for the ORBCOMM, launched from Cape Canaveral. Few remember the payload of this mission - although the satellites from this launch are still active to this day - what made this a historic mission is what happened to the first stage booster after it completed its job.
The booster flipped around 180 degrees, and relit three of its engines to kill and then reverse its downrange velocity, putting it on a trajectory back to the site it had launched from minutes earlier. It flipped 180 degrees again, and relit those engines as it reentered the atmosphere, shedding velocity and shielding the booster in the wake of the plume’s interaction with the air.
And then, streaking through the night sky back towards the Cape, the massive 41 metre long booster lit a single engine for the last time, to slow its terminal velocity fall to a gentle touchdown on a concrete pad near the launch pad.
When this happened, my youngest son was about one month old. I didn’t stay up to watch the launch and landing live - I was asleep at the time. I watched the replay in the morning, and thankfully nobody spoiled it for me!
It is so normal now people forget what an incredible moment this was. You can still watch the livestream and see the reaction of the SpaceX staff for a taste of it.
We had seen smaller rockets land like this - around a month earlier the suborbital New Shepard had completed its first successful propulsive landing, and I had remembered reading stories about DC-X in the 1990s, doing it with a true orbital launch vehicle was something much different. As a child I owned many books, written in the late 70s and early 80s, about future space colonies - one had a Stanford Torus on the cover. But adulthood, a science education, and the banal realities of the actual space program crushed such dreams. The failures and ultimate whimpering out of the Space Shuttle program seemed to close the door on near term reusable spaceflight, and thus any prospect of it becoming cheaper. Seeing what SpaceX accomplished was like sunlight breaking through the clouds - suddenly, all the things I had thought were impossible just might be achievable. The dream was back on.
Not everybody was convinced though.
The Doubters
In this article in SpaceNews, the then CEO of ArianeSpace expressed his doubts about Falcon 9. At the time, Ariane 5 was the undisputed leader in commercial space. Indeed the article is mainly about how they had secured more commercial launch orders than SpaceX in 2015.
The CEO, Stephane Israel, leveled the usual criticism at reuse - it comes at the cost of customer payload, it’s not clear if the booster is in a fit state to be reflown, it requires a lot of flights to make it work.
The first of these is true, of course - an expendable Falcon 9 can carry about 50% more to orbit than a reused one. And this did limit for a while SpaceX in its ability to secure commercial geostationary contracts, to the benefit of ArianeSpace. But later performance upgrades (as well as the general cooling of this part of the market) got rid of that advantage.
The first booster landed, B1019, was successfully static fired again but was never reflown. The kind of regular reflight we see now required several upgrades, driven by what SpaceX learned from getting their boosters back intact. For instance, the aluminium grid fins tended to melt and were replaced with titanium ones. So although questioning the condition of returning boosters might have had some merit at the time - it was only through booster recovery that it was possible to iterate to a more reusable booster.
As for the flight rate - even without the breakthrough of Starlink, the cost competitiveness of Falcon 9 let it both eat up the existing market and open new ones, such as rideshare missions. Failing to see this coming is just a failure to anticipate how the market might change.
At the time, across its fleet of rockets ArianeSpace had 12 launches that year next to only 6 successful flights for SpaceX. Perhaps some confidence was justified. However, in 2025, they launched just 7 rockets, while SpaceX is on track to launch 170.
Normality
I don’t watch many Falcon 9 livestreams anymore; there isn’t typically much new to see. It is astonishing that what was a historic moment a decade ago is now done routinely several times a week. It is so unnoticed by most people, that I occasionally see critics of SpaceX/Elon Musk snark that they can’t launch a rocket without it exploding, because they only saw a series of failed Starship test flights.
But we shouldn’t take for granted how much the world has changed. This year, there have been more Falcon payloads launched than the Shuttle flew in its entire 30 year career. Multiple companies have started because of this technology, either exploiting the cheap launch it enables or through following the lead of SpaceX. SpaceX themselves have been able to build on the success of Falcon to develop Starship. That first landing opened the door to all of this.
The doubters and cynics may have sounded smart in the moment, but those amazed by Flight 20 were ultimately correct. We can only imagine what the next decade in commercial spaceflight will bring.