Reusable rockets are cheaper and offer space launch companies the ability to send off more flights in shorter timespans. Companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rely on the concept to make feasible the economics of taking heavy payloads to space, and it’s likely to define the future of spaceflight.
SpaceX has been successfully launching and reusing a number of rockets and vehicles, even landing Falcon boosters on drone-controlled ships in the middle of the ocean so they can be collected and used again. Blue Origin, meanwhile, plans to send a mission to the Moon in 2024 with reusable rockets based on the New Shepard and New Glenn, both vertical-takeoff and -landing spacecraft.
SpaceX has even grander plans for its forthcoming
Starship rocket. Musk has said he wants to reach Mars with the craft, which underwent preliminary tests in August.
That rocket, in an eerily similar echo of DC-X’s own desert tests more than 20 years earlier, recently lifted off from Boca Chica, Texas, atop an iridescent javelin of flame and returned gently to the ground just minutes later.
Starship, and others like it, will likely one day form the basis for humanity’s next wave of exploration into the solar system. Dumbacher and the DC-X team might not have known it as they watched their futuristic rocket lift off in 1993, but they were watching the future unfold.