Explode, reuse, recycle🍋
The changing economics of space launch
2025 is already a great year for rocket nerds.
The first launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket in January successfully delivered a payload to orbit. That success was only slightly marred by the explosion of the rocket’s first stage, while attempting an ambitious return to a waiting landing barge.1
The next day saw the 7th test launch of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket. Its first stage aced its return to land, but the upper stage exploded during ascent — an RUD or “rapid unscheduled disassembly” in rocket-nerd language. Undeterred, SpaceX launched its 8th test on 6 March. This one was pretty much a re-run, including the explosion, which was visible from Florida and the Bahamas. Both failures have been attributed to harmonic oscillations in the system supplying methane to the rocket engines. SpaceX will no doubt try a 9th test launch in the next month or two, hopefully fixing this issue.
On March 30, European firm Isar Aerospace launched its new Spectrum rocket. Its flight lasted just 40 seconds, ending — you guessed it — with an explosion.2 Putting a positive spin on the outcome, a company spokesperson announced that they now have 40 seconds of valuable data, which could not have been obtained any other way.
NZ-US company Rocket Lab is developing a mid-sized rocket Neutron to replace its successful small-sized Electron. Neutron’s first launch is expected in the second half of this year. Fireworks might be expected …
These companies, along with other wannabes, are responding to radical shifts in the economics of space launch. But firstly, what’s so hard (and expensive) about getting stuff into space?
The physics of space launch is really punishing
Space launch reminds be of the early Everest expeditions. To get a team of say 10 climbers and their food and equipment to base camp, you needed say 100 porters. But then those porters needed food and equipment, requiring even more porters. Who also needed food and equipment, and so on. An expedition might start out 300 strong, sending porters home as food stocks are consumed.
Rocket design faces a similar problem. A rocket needs to carry all the fuel it might need, which makes it heavier, needing even more fuel. For example, the Saturn V rocket, which launched the successful Apollo missions to the moon, weighed nearly 3000 tonnes on the launch pad.3 90% of that was fuel.4
A 3000 tonne rocket was necessary to get around 130 tonnes to low-earth orbit. And of that 130 tonnes, just 5.6 tonnes made it back to Earth. The Apollo missions left a trail of debris behind. Hardware no longer required fell into the ocean; burned up in Earth’s atmosphere; or was abandoned on the lunar surface, or in orbits around the sun or the moon.
Rocket fuel is cheap, relatively speaking. But rocket hardware is not. It’s arguably more complex than aircraft hardware, which doesn’t come cheap. For example, a Boeing 777-300ER, a common long-haul jet, costs around US$375m. Airline travel is affordable because the fixed costs of aircraft get spread across large numbers of flights. A 777-300ER can, in theory, perform 60,000 trips, or up to 160,000 flying hours.5 A disposable stage of a rocket takes only one trip, that might last just minutes.
Reusability drives a cost revolution
For 50 years, space was the business of governments. And, among the many priorities of government, cost reduction rarely receives a high priority. This can be clearly seen in the following graph.6 (And yes, the Y-axis really does have a log scale. The bend would be much more dramatic if the graph had a linear scale.)
What was behind that bend? Reusability, combined with scale. To date, it's mostly a SpaceX story.7 It launched a used Falcon 9 booster in March 2017; since then it has launched over 400 of them, reusing individual boosters up to 26 times. In the process, SpaceX has radically reduced the cost of launch.
Reusability has also led to an improvement in reliability. As every engineer knows, brand new hardware hasn’t had the bugs ironed out. Customers noticed that reflown hardware is more reliable. Insurers have also noticed — insuring a launch on a reused rocket costs 25-40% less than one on a disposable rocket.8
SpaceX’s many competitors are racing to catch up on partial-reuse. Meanwhile SpaceX iterates towards full reusability of its Starship rockets … with the odd explosion along the way.
NASA’s space shuttle pioneered reusability. The shuttle had a reusable orbiter and solid booster rockets, with a disposable external fuel tank. However, as you can see in the graph above, the shuttle turned out to be more expensive on a $/Kg basis than its disposable predecessors.
There are many reasons why the space shuttle failed to turn partial reusability into lower costs. Robert Zubrin, founder and president of the Mars Society, attributes it a change in how NASA operated.
[NASA] “has two distinct modes of operation, and one I call the purpose-driven mode and the other is the vendor-driven mode. In the purpose-driven mode [e.g. Apollo], the purpose comes first, you spend money to do things. In the vendor-driven mode, you do things in order to spend money ...
“We have to have a program leadership which is committed … not as a way to get pet technology programs funded, or pet constituencies funded, or pet vendors funded, or any of that stuff.”9
My two-cents’ worth is that the shuttle required human pilots, which eliminated the possibility of iteratively refining its design by trying-and-failing. High consequences of failure also led to long and expensive testing and refurbishment between flights.
High costs and long gaps between flights led to fewer flights overall, and poor scale economies. In all, the shuttle flew 135 missions over a 30-year period. By contrast, 134 Falcon 9 rockets were launched last year alone.
Lower costs ⇒ increased demand, increased possibilities
With lower launch costs, many ideas have moved from the realm of science fiction to frenzied startups, and even into the hands of consumers. My standard mobile phone, when out of cell tower range, now connects to the GlobalStar network for SOS calls, and to the SpaceX Starlink network, for texting.10 Who would have thought that possible, even a few years back?
Old ideas like orbiting power stations are back on the cards. As is space tourism, for the very well heeled at least.
Beyond reuse …
Under US$200/Kg to low-earth orbit will very cheap by historical standards. But low-earth orbit is really not that far away. The International Space Station, for example, orbits just 400 km above us. Space launch will likely remain outrageously expensive compared to air travel — I can fly the 500 km from Wellington to Auckland for around US$2/Kg (or even less on a discount fare).
The high costs of launch make anything actually in orbit very valuable. That potentially includes space junk — used launch vehicles and non-functional satellites. And where resources are both cheap to purchase11 and valuable in another use, there is the economic opportunity to recycle.
British startup Magdrive has announced the development of a revolutionary engine for satellites that uses solid metal as fuel. This technology could help utilize space junk — turning old satellites into an energy source for rockets proceeding beyond the confines of Earth’s gravity.
Explode, reuse, recycle!
By Dave Heatley
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More specifically, the first stage’s engines failed to re-ignite for its “boost back” burn, which is needed to redirect the vehicle back towards its intended landing site. The stage was destroyed by its flight-termination system — explosives placed on board to deal with this, and other unplanned or undesirable circumstances.
I tried to resist putting peppering this post with videos of exploding rockets. But if you do want to see a great one, here’s the first launch of the Isar Aerospace Spectrum.
Richard W. Orloff (2000). APOLLO BY THE NUMBERS: A Statistical Reference, NASA SP-2000-4029.
By “fuel” I mean both chemical fuel (hydrogen in this case) and oxidiser (oxygen). Unlike jet aircraft, which can source their oxidiser from the atmosphere, rockets have to carry their own oxidiser with them. This adds weight, and complexity.
Gabriel Leigh (2022). Nothing but a number? Aircraft age explained, 3 November, FlightRadar24 Blog.
Source: Payload Research (2024). The Starship Report: a comprehensive look into SpaceX’s next-generation launch vehicle. January 2024. Available at: https://payloadspace.com/starship-report/. For a graph with datapoints labelled, see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit.
SpaceX dominates the industry, with more than 60% of global launches and owning more than half of currently operational satellites (see here for a great visualisation).
Bao Tran (2025). Reusable Rockets vs. Disposable Rockets: Market Trends and Cost Reduction Stats, 10 March, PatentPC.
I can confirm that texting via satellite works just fine. I’ve had no reason to try out the SOS feature, thankfully!
As de-orbiting space junk takes resources, its owners are incentivised to sell such junk at a zero (or even negative) price.