Reusable rockets: where the field actually stands
One booster has now flown 37 times, launch costs sit near $2,600/kg against the Shuttle's $54,500, and SpaceX flew 165 orbital missions in 2025 — more than the rest of the world combined. In 2026 Blue Origin and China finally joined the reuse club, and Starship still has not been caught.
Reusable launch carries four metrics and 14 milestones here, and it is the field on this tracker where the frontier technology has most clearly already won.
The numbers are lopsided. SpaceX flew 165 orbital missions in 2025, against Rocket Lab's 21 Electron flights (at 100% success) and Blue Origin's 2 New Glenn launches. Booster B1067 reached 37 flights in August 2026, on the 100th Falcon 9 launch of that year alone — far past Falcon 9's original ten-flight design life. Publicly cited cost to low Earth orbit on a reused Falcon 9 is about $2,600/kg, against roughly $54,500/kg for the Space Shuttle, a twenty-fold reduction that reshaped every downstream field on this site, from satellite internet to commercial space stations. Research output is small, about 222 papers a year, which is what a field looks like once the hard problem is an engineering and operations problem rather than a physics one.
2026 ended SpaceX's monopoly on orbital reuse, if not its dominance. Blue Origin reflew a recovered New Glenn first stage in April, the first company besides SpaceX to do so, after landing one at sea in November 2025. In July, China's CASC recovered a Long March 10B first stage at sea about six minutes after stage separation, using four hooks catching a tensioned cable net on the recovery vessel — a legless design saving mass, and the first net-based recovery anywhere. Reflight is still to come for CASC.
Blue Origin's year was not uniformly good: a New Glenn first stage exploded during a static-fire test at LC-36 in May, destroying the booster and damaging the company's only New Glenn pad, in what was reported as the most powerful rocket explosion since the Soviet N1 in 1969. No injuries; return to flight is targeted before the end of 2026.
Starship is the open question. V3 debuted in May 2026 on Flight 12, and Flight 13 in July worked end to end on the ship side: it deployed a full batch of 20 Starlink V3 satellites, relit a Raptor in space, and put the ship down in the Indian Ocean in a splashdown SpaceX judged accurate enough for a tower catch. The booster half did not work — only 10 of 13 engines relit for the landing burn and Booster 20 was destroyed on impact. In late August the Flight 13 ship was pulled intact from the water near Christmas Island, the first full Starship to survive a test flight and be recovered. That is salvage, not reuse: it was recovered from the ocean, not caught by a tower, and nothing recovered this way has been reflown.
SpaceX also raised $75B in the largest IPO in history in June 2026, trading on Nasdaq as SPCX at roughly a $1.75T valuation, and flew a first demo of Starfall, a reusable capsule aimed at returning manufactured goods from orbit.
The locked milestone is a fully and rapidly reusable super-heavy rocket in service with airline-like turnaround. Falcon 9 proved orbital reuse; Starship has not yet proved rapid reuse at heavy-lift scale.