A single-use rocket booster can cost anywhere from 10 to 500 million dollars. Currently, rockets sent into space will come back into Earth’s orbit and land in the ocean, where specialized diving teams disassemble them and return them to the company that sent the rocket up. While this works, there is a way to optimize this method for cost-effectiveness – finding a way to land or catch the rockets after they come back into Earth’s orbit. Finding a method for doing this would significantly save costs of rocket launches, and make space exploration more accessible.

A current front-runner in space exploration is Elon Musk. Elon Musk and the engineers at SpaceX did exactly this in their recent launch and landing of the Starship rocket. The Starship is a 120-meter rocket project which was started by Elon in 2012. SpaceX’s most recent launch of the Starship had a launch cost of only 10 million dollars, most of which was spent on fuel. Musk and SpaceX were able to catch the returning rocket booster between two massive steel beams, entirely preserving the booster.

This landing is an immense milestone in space exploration as the calculations to land the rocket had to be exact to get the rocket booster to land in between the two steel beams. Now that SpaceX has been able to do this once, they will be able to do it again. The ability to continuously catch rocket boosters to preserve materials will allow rockets to be sent into orbit more frequently. Because rockets can be sent into space more frequently, more tests can be done, and more mysteries about space can be uncovered.

As the earth’s population grows, crowding will become an issue, and shortages of goods will occur often. Because of Elon’s recent accomplishment, life on Martian planets is becoming a thing of the present. As more and more discoveries are made, we get closer and closer to expanding our existence on other planets.