A single Falcon 9 booster flies 30+ times

Reusability stopped being a stunt and became routine: by 2026 SpaceX’s record-setting Falcon 9 booster, B1067, had flown and landed more than 30 times, approaching the ~39 lifetime flights of a Space Shuttle orbiter — but on a turnaround of weeks rather than months and at a fraction of the cost.

Each reflight is a direct refutation of decades of expert consensus that orbital rockets could not be economically reused. Routinely flying the same first stage 20–35 times is the engine behind SpaceX’s record launch cadence and its collapse in cost-per-kilogram to orbit.

The economics compound with every flight: each reflight spreads the booster’s build cost across more missions, so the marginal cost of a launch trends toward fuel, refurbishment and operations rather than a fresh multi-million-dollar rocket. That is why no expendable competitor can match Falcon 9 on price, and why reusability — long dismissed as a costly engineering vanity — is now the assumed baseline that every serious new rocket, from Blue Origin’s New Glenn to China’s would-be Falcon clones, is designed around.