With recent Falcon 9 milestones, SpaceX vindicates its “dumb” approach to reuse

"I remember watching the live video and seeing the light of the engine on the ocean," Mueller said. "And holy shit, it was there. The rocket came down, landed in the ocean, and blew up. That was unreal. It worked the first time. I was like, get the barge ready. Get the landing legs ready. This shit works."

It would take a good deal more tinkering and experimentation, but by December 2015, SpaceX had landed its first rocket on a pad along the Florida coast. The first drone ship landing followed in April 2016. A little less than a year after this, SpaceX re-flew a Falcon 9 stage for the first time.

Silencing the doubters

Many people in the industry were skeptical about SpaceX's approach to reuse. In the mid-2010s, both the European and Japanese space agencies were looking to develop their next generation of rockets. In both cases, Europe with the Ariane 6 and Japan with the H3, the space agencies opted for traditional, expendable rockets instead of pushing toward reuse.

As a result, both of these competitors for commercial satellite launches are now about a decade behind SpaceX in terms of launch technology. If the ambitious Starship rocket is successful, that gap could widen further.

In the United States, the main competitor to SpaceX has historically been United Launch Alliance. Their reaction to SpaceX's plan to reuse first stages a decade ago was dismissive. The company's engineers wrote papers and performed studies that argued SpaceX's plans were impractical.

Almost one decade ago, to the date, United Launch Alliance began sharing a graphic that demonstrated its approach—to separate only the engine section of the Vulcan rocket—was superior. The company dubbed this approach SMART, an acronym for Sensible Modular Autonomous Return Technology. The implication in this name, of course, is that SpaceX's booster flyback approach was dumb.

According to the United Launch Alliance analysis in 2015, the SMART plan would result in cost savings as soon as the second launch of a booster. SpaceX's approach, by contrast, would require 10 flights for there to be any cost savings.

One imagines that those engineers never dreamed that, a decade later, SpaceX would fly the same rocket 30 times and reach an annual launch cadence that approaches the total number of rockets United Launch Alliance has flown during its 20-year existence. As for SMART, it remains a theoretical concept.