Reusable Rockets: A Revolution Like the Invention of Sail

The world's first-ever orbital rocket landing. Why reusability matters, by the numbers.

by Rod D. Martin
December 23, 2015

On the heels of Jeff Bezo's impressive landing of a New Shepherd rocket last month, Elon Musk's achievement this week is a genuine revolution at hand, like that of advancing from canoes to the Age of Sail.

There is really only one thing holding humanity back from expanding across space: Earth's gravity well. It is terribly expensive to lift anything all the way from Earth's surface up into the beyond. Once there, space travel is like a game of pool: send something in a particular direction and it will keep going until something stops it. But first, you have to get there.

Still, it might be easy to miss the significance of the past month's achievements. What's the big deal, after all, about landing a rocket? We see airplanes land all the time, after all.

But that's exactly the point. Airplanes are routine: you don't have to build a new one every time you fly. If you did, on average (based on list price for a new 737), that would increase each airline ticke…