REUSABLE ROCKET TECHNOLOGY
Perhaps one of the greatest concerns about
space exploration raised in recent years is not
only the vast quantities of money required
to send humans into space but the natural
resources, too. In 2021 at the Kennedy Space
Center in Florida, SpaceX sent humans to
space for the third time in less than a year,
with astronauts sailing into orbit on a reused
Falcon 9 rocket booster—the same booster that
was used to send the Crew-1 mission to the
International Space Station the year prior. The
crew also traveled aboard a used spacecraft:
the same Dragon capsule, called Endeavour,
that NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug
Hurley used during their Demo-2 test light
in May 2020. Three missions from one vehicle
is a signiicant leap forward, not only in terms
of the environmental beneits but also the
inancial beneits. If you wanted a seat on
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, you’d need to cough
up an eye-watering $55 million, and a seat on
Starliner costs somewhere around $90 million,
according to government watchdog reports. On
the other hand, trips aboard Virgin Galactic’s VSS
Unity will cost passengers $250,000 apiece - and
depending on reusable rockets and technology
should bring those prices down even further as
innovations are made across the wider sector.
SpaceX and NASA have both agreed that
reusable spacecraft is essential in order to make
space travel more afordable and sustainable,
and though the concept is not new, with NASA
reusing a small leet of space shuttles in the past,
it’s only SpaceX that has been able to create
reusable rockets. It dates back to December
2015, when SpaceX successfully returned a