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You may have heard a lot about Elon Musk and his various projects, including SpaceX, what is this project?

SpaceX is a private American aerospace manufacturer that is based in California.

It was founded in 2002 with the goal to build affordable rockets and enable the colonisation of Mars.

The project originated :

SpaceX was founded on 6th May 2002 by Elon Musk. The company's stated objectives are to enable the colonization of Mars and, in order to achieve this, to lower the cost of space transportation and access to space in general. One of the main reasons that space travel is so expensive is that more-or-less none of the hardware that has previously flown has ever been re-used (even the Space Shuttle required extensive overhauls between flights, including replacement of many thermal tiles on the orbiter, and the complete overhaul of the solid rocket boosters - a costly process which took months). First stage boosters would be expended into the ocean, and even manned spacecraft that were built to withstand re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere would never fly twice. Therefore reusability has been at the heart of SpaceX's decision making, and design and manufacturing processes.

Falcon 1 was the first rocket developed by SpaceX. It was however fully expendable, since the technology to reuse boosters had not yet been developed. Standing at around 21m (68ft) tall, it had a payload to low Earth orbit capacity of around 420-500kg, although it never carried any more than 180kg before the vehicle was retired. After some initial launch delays and failures, the Falcon 1 achieved fame when it became the first privately funded launch vehicle to put a payload into orbit in 2008, on its fourth flight. After its 5th flight in 2009 it was retired in favour of development work on the new Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 is a much more powerful and significantly larger vehicle than Falcon 1. Whereas Falcon 1 was powered by a single first stage Merlin engine, the Falcon 9 has nine of them. The first version of the Falcon 9 could lift up to about 10 tonnes to low Earth orbit. Recall that this is around 20 times more than Falcon 1, and later iterations of the rocket increased this ratio further. The Falcon 9 was designed with reusability of the first stage booster in mind. Remarkably, it only took just over 5 years from the maiden flight of Falcon 9 in 2010, to the first successful landing of a booster in 2015. At which point they became the first organisation in the world (including governments) to achieve this feat. The following graphic illustrates the sequence of steps in bringing the first stage back to Earth.

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