How the Falcon 9 became the most successful rocket ever
SpaceX vs. everyone else
In the past year or so, tech companies have started eyeing out low earth orbit as a potential new place to have cost-efficient data centers for generative AI training. Most notably, both Google and Meta have shown serious interest in the idea and could become key players in the race for LEO. After all, they’re tech giants, they can do practically anything right? Well, they may have basically infinite money and an insane fleet of engineers ready at a minute’s notice but all these companies lack one VERY crucial piece of the puzzle: a rocket.
It might seem like a stupid thing to say, but without your very own rocket, you’re either going to need to buy rocket launches from a third party or you’re going to wave your dreams goodbye because, unless Google discovers some kind of magical way of teleporting computers to LEO, as of June 2026, they’re not going anywhere on their own.
So what kind of options do these companies have to buy launches? You basically have two options:
- SpaceX’s Falcon 9
- Any other rocket
No one knows the true price at which SpaceX sells a F9 launch, let alone the price that it costs them to launch one. However, it has been estimated that the Falcon 9 costs around $20 million to launch. (assuming that the booster isn’t new) This leaves SpaceX an enormous margin compared to basically everybody else. They can be very kind and lower the ticket price to stupid low or make it ever so slightly lower than their competitor’s and thus make an insane profit.
Knowing this, it should be extremely obvious why the Falcon 9 has become the default choice when it comes to launch a small to medium sized satellite to low earth orbit. The Falcon 9 is like a deal that’s too good to be true, except it’s actually real. The rocket has exceeded all of the industry’s expectation and single-handedly restarted the space race. It’s not magic, they just re-use it.
A reusable revolution
The Falcon 9 is the first actually partially-reusable rocket ever made. Yes, the space shuttle exists, but calling that re-usable is being very kind considering the time it took to refurbish the orbiter after every flight. The Falcon 9 started as “logical” next step to the “Falcon 5” which was itself supposed to be Falcon 1’s big brother. Instead, SpaceX jumped straight from the little 21m tall F1 to the 70m tall F9, mostly thanks to an increase in budget from NASA’s CRS contract as well as all the experience the teams acquired from the five F1 flights.
Falcon 9 started as an ambitious medium-sized rocket that could deliver cargo to the ISS and maybe even crew in the future. Although SpaceX’s founder Elon Musk had always wanted to build a somewhat reusable vehicle, the first eight launches of the rocket known today for landing had no landing legs. It also took SpaceX three years to accomplish eight F9 flights, something they could accomplish today in around four weeks. Starting from flight number nine, SpaceX attempted various recovery maneuvers all of which were unsuccessful until the now famous Falcon Flight 20.
In 2017, SpaceX flew their first re-used F9 booster, that was flight number 32. Less than ten years later, Falcon 9 has lifted off over SIX HUNDRED times as of writing this. Another interesting fact is that SpaceX only ever built around 100 F9 boosters which means, if you take the first 32 non-reused flights that each booster has flown ten times on average. The current fleat leader has flown 34 times.
Access to space has an economic reality
Let me say this again, the booster which has flown the most in SpaceX’s Falcon 9 fleet, has launched and then landed thirty-four times. SpaceX did not pay to build a new first stage more than 500 times according to their website. It only makes sense for SpaceX to be generating so much profit from these launches. It’s a rare win-win situation in aerospace. The customer gets a cheap flight, SpaceX still makes a better profit than their competitors.
When I see tech companies, or say, the various foreign space agencies promising all these wonderful things they’ll do in LEO, I can’t help myself but laugh. They are trying to replicate what SpaceX has done without the rocket. Sometime ago, re-use was a doubted concept. Nowadays, if you want your medium-sized rocket to have a future, it HAS to be at least partially reusable. Not parachute-reusable, not engine-per-engine-reusable, real-reusable. I haven’t even touched on Falcon Heavy, but it’s basically the same concept applied at a larger scale. In fact, Falcon 9 ended up becoming so successful that it’s possible SpaceX stole their own customers from Falcon Heavy to Falcon 9 given the much slower cadence FH has seen over the years.
SpaceX did invent something unprecedented but it’s not magic. Rocket reuse is far from easy but it’s absolutely possible and most importantly, scalable. Reuse has to be taken extremely seriously or else we risk having big outsider companies being dissapointed from their results because they didn’t bother making a reusable rocket and losing a huge potential market.