The
booster casings for the
Space Shuttle Solid Rocket Boosters were recovered and refurbished for reuse from 1981 to 2011 as part of the
Space Shuttle program. In a new development program initiated in 2011,
SpaceX developed
reusable first stages of their
Falcon 9 rocket. After launching the second stage and the payload, the booster
returns to launch site or flies to a
drone ship and
lands vertically. After landing multiple boosters both on land and on drone ships in 2015–2016, a landed stage was first reflown in March 2017:
Rocket core B1021 that had been used to launch a re-supply mission to the
ISS when new in April 2016 was subsequently used to launch the satellite
SES-10 in March 2017. The program was intended to reduce launch prices significantly, and by 2018, SpaceX had reduced launch prices on a flight-proven boosters to , the
lowest price in the industry for
medium-lift launch services. By August 2019, the
recovery and reuse of Falcon 9 boosters had become routine, with booster landings/recovery being attempted on more than 90 percent of all SpaceX flights, and successful landings and recoveries occurring 65 times out of 75 attempts. In total 25 recovered boosters have been refurbished and subsequently flown a second time by late 2020, with several having been flown a third time as well. In late 2020,
Rocket Lab guided the booster of their
Electron rocket for a splashdown in the
Pacific Ocean with a
parafoil after launching the
Return to Sender mission, as part of a program to catch the booster with a helicopter and reuse it on later missions. ==Use in aviation==