Recovery & Reuse
Grid fins, drone ships, and Mechazilla — the systems that land rockets and reflew them.
Explore the technologies that turned rocketry from expendable to reusable. From Falcon 9 booster landings to Starship’s tower catch, understand how recovery systems work and why they reshaped the economics of spaceflight.
For half a century, rockets were thrown away after a single flight — like scrapping an airliner after one trip. Falcon 9 broke that pattern: after staging, the booster flips around, relights its engines for a boostback and entry burn, steers with hypersonic titanium grid fins, deploys landing legs, and sets down on a pad or an autonomous drone ship at sea. SpaceX first landed an orbital-class booster in December 2015, and individual boosters have since flown well over a dozen times each, with fairings fished from the ocean and reused too.
Starship pushes reuse further by removing hardware from the rocket itself: instead of carrying legs, the Super Heavy booster returns to the launch mount and is caught in mid-air by the “Mechazilla” tower arms, first achieved in October 2024. The payoff is straightforward — when the most expensive part of the rocket flies again and again, the cost of reaching orbit falls dramatically, which is the single biggest reason launch prices have dropped over the past decade.