[30] In September 2013, SpaceX said that if all aspects of the test program were successful and if a customer is interested, the first reflight of a Falcon 9 booster stage could happen as early as late 2014.

[26] In February 2014, SpaceX made explicit that the newly defined super-heavy launch vehicle for what was then called Mars Colonial Transporter would also make use of the reusable technology.

[38] In September 2016, SpaceX announced that development was underway to extend the reusable flight hardware to second stages[citation needed], a more challenging engineering problem because the vehicle is travelling at orbital velocity.

[26][67] Michael Belfiore wrote in Foreign Policy in 2013 that, at a published cost of US$56.5 million per launch to low Earth orbit, "Falcon 9 rockets are already the cheapest in the industry.

[68][69] Space industry analyst Ajay Kothari has noted that SpaceX reusable technology could do for space transport "what jet engines did for air transportation sixty years ago when people never imagined that more than 500 million passengers would travel by airplanes every year and that the cost could be reduced to the level it is—all because of passenger volume and reliable reusability.

SpaceX's biggest customer, SES, said it wants to be the first to ride a reused vehicle, though it wants a launch price of US$30 million or a 50% saving to offset the risk of pioneering the process.

Prior to the reusability program's success in December 2015, the return of an orbital launch system booster rocket had never been accomplished, and many questioned both technical and economic feasibility.

[83] Elon Musk said at the beginning of the program that he believed the return, vertical landing and recovery was possible because the SpaceX manufacturing methodologies result in a rocket efficiency exceeding the typical 3% margin.

While early customers of reused rockets asked for a lower price,[85] a booster that has flown already has been demonstrated to work under realistic flight conditions.

[98] Grasshopper, the company's first VTVL test vehicle, consisted of a Falcon 9 v1.0 first-stage tank, a single Merlin-1D engine, and four permanently attached steel landing legs.

[32][105][needs update] The DragonFly test vehicle is powered by eight SuperDraco engines, arranged in a redundant pattern to support fault-tolerance in the propulsion system design.

[29] SpaceX announced in February 2014 the intent to continue the tests to land the first-stage booster in the ocean until precision control from hypersonic through subsonic regimes had been proven.

During the 2015 launch hiatus, SpaceX requested regulatory approval from the FAA to attempt returning their next flight to Cape Canaveral instead of targeting a floating platform in the ocean.

Falcon 9 Flight 21 launched the Jason-3 satellite on January 17, 2016, and attempted to land on the floating platform Just Read the Instructions,[115] located for the first time about 200 miles (320 km) out in the Pacific Ocean.

Approximately 9 minutes into the flight, the live video feed from the drone ship went down due to the loss of its lock on the uplink satellite.

Starting in January 2015, SpaceX positioned stable floating platforms a few hundred miles off the coast along the rocket trajectory; those transformed barges were called autonomous spaceport drone ships.

Nine minutes after liftoff, the booster landed vertically on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, 300 km from the Florida coastline, achieving a long-sought-after milestone for the SpaceX reusability development program.

During 2016 and 2017, SpaceX has recovered a number of first stages to both land and drone ships, helping them optimize the procedures needed to re-use the boosters rapidly.

Three GTO missions for heavy payloads (EchoStar 23 in March 2017, Inmarsat-5 F4 in May 2017 and Intelsat 35e in July 2017) were flown in an expendable configuration, not equipped for landing.

[43] The "bouncy castle" meme was in fact a net strung between large arms of a fast platform supply vessel named Mr. Steven (now GO Ms. Tree).

The recovery vessel is equipped with dynamic positioning systems, and was tested after the launch of the Paz satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in 2017.

[147] This recovery attempt was not fully successful; the fairing missed the boat by a few hundred meters but landed intact in the water[148] before being recovered and taken back to port.

By April 2021, SpaceX had abandoned the experimental program to attempt recovery of dry payload fairings under parachute descent in a net on a fast ship.

[144] Despite early public statements that SpaceX would endeavor to make the Falcon 9 second-stage reusable as well, by late 2014, they determined that the mass needed for a re-entry heat shield, landing engines, and other equipment to support recovery of the second stage as well as the diversion of development resources from other company objectives was at that time prohibitive, and indefinitely suspended their second-stage reusability plans for the Falcon rockets.

In a student conference, Musk briefly mentioned a theoretical heavy‑lift launch vehicle code-named BFR, later known as the Falcon XX.

He envisioned it as a reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle that could deliver approximately 150 to 200 metric tons (330,000 to 440,000 lb) to low Earth orbit.

[181] When an Interplanetary Spaceship enters the atmosphere, it cools itself via transpiration and controls the spacecraft's descent by moving its delta wings and split flaps.

[186] In January 2019, Musk announced that Starship would be made from stainless steel and stated that this might be stronger than an equivalent carbon composite in a wide range of temperatures.

[195] On 3 April 2020, during SN3's cryogenic proof test, a valve leaked the liquid nitrogen inside its lower tank, causing the vessel to depressurize and collapse.

[222] Despite the significant damage to the flaps, which Starship relied on for aerodynamic control, a successful water landing was achieved, albeit 6 kilometers off target.