Engineering news
The company plans to reuse the Falcon 9 first stage booster it successfully landed on a drone ship in last April. That landing came after the Falcon 9 lifted a cargo ship toward the International Space Station.
The cost of putting something into lower Earth orbit stands at about $10,000 (£8,000) per kilo – and it is considerably more to put something into high orbit.
“This would be a significant step, but if we can get the price down to about £1,000 per kilo it will be a real game changer,” says Mark Galloway, outreach officer for the University of Hertfordshire’s School of Physics, Astronomy and Mathematics. “It will make space travel accessible to poorer nations, but also to individuals.”
In December 2015, SpaceX launched a satellite into orbit aboard a Falcon 9 rocket, then safely landed the rocket's lower half, called a first-stage booster, on a launchpad – something no commercial aerospace company had done before.
“The development of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo ship have created a significant step change in launch capability," says Helen Meese from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers. "SpaceX have suggested that they will launch the first refurbished rocket at the end of March but there is still much to do to prove the long-term reliability and safety of this technology.”
There are other researchers working on similar tasks - for instance, a British team Reaction Engines is developing the Sabre engine – a so-called air breathing rocket that would bring a spacecraft into orbit and then return, without dropping any parts, as it is traditionally done with space launches.
Blue Origin, a rival private space company backed by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos reused its - much smaller - launch stage last year, while NASA's Space Shuttle missions flew with reusable solid fuel booster rockets, although these did not do a controlled landing, but fell back to earth on parachutes and were then recovered from then ocean.