The Same Rocket Is Flying Into Space for the 36th Time This Morning. Before 2015, That Number Was Always 1.

A piece of metal has launched into orbit 35 times. This morning, it's going again.

The booster is called B1067. It's the first stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 — and at 5:25 AM EDT today, lifting off from Cape Canaveral's Pad 40, it will attempt its 36th trip to space. No rocket booster in the history of spaceflight has done this before. Not once. Not even close.

Let that number sit for a second.

For 60 Years, Every Rocket Flew Once. Then Sank.

Before SpaceX, the rules of rocketry were simple and brutal: you build it, you fuel it, you launch it — and eight minutes later, it's tumbling into the Atlantic Ocean. Gone forever. Every time.

The Saturn V that carried Apollo 11 to the Moon? Destroyed. The Atlas V that launched half-billion-dollar military satellites? Dropped into the sea the moment it finished the job. The Ariane 5 that sent the James Webb Space Telescope into deep space? Fallen and drowned before the payload reached orbit.

It was the aerospace equivalent of flying a 747 from New York to London, landing it at Heathrow, and immediately pushing it off a cliff. Then building a new one for the next flight.

What B1067 Actually Is

B1067 first flew in May 2021. In the five years since, it has launched dozens of missions. And every time — after separating from the upper stage above the atmosphere — it has fired its engines in reverse, deployed four landing legs, and touched down on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic. Autonomously. Without a pilot.

Then SpaceX technicians board the ship, inspect the booster, refurbish it, transport it back to the launch site, and do it again.

To understand how physically insane this is, look at what happens during a rocket launch. The main engines fire at temperatures exceeding 3,300°C — hotter than the surface of the Sun. During re-entry, the booster screams back through the atmosphere at speeds that would vaporize most materials. Then it slows itself down and lands vertically on a ship the size of a football field. Then you do it 35 more times.

The Number That Rewrote the Industry

A new Falcon 9 booster costs roughly $28–30 million to manufacture. A reflight is estimated at a fraction of that — public reporting suggests somewhere between $1–3 million per reuse, though SpaceX hasn't confirmed official figures.

Multiply that across 36 flights and the economics become staggering. The savings from a single booster reaching this milestone could theoretically fund multiple standalone missions. This is why SpaceX can charge less per kilogram to orbit than almost every competitor on Earth — and why those competitors are struggling to adapt.

To be fair: there are limits that haven't been fully disclosed. SpaceX inspects every booster between flights, but the company hasn't published a public engineering ceiling for how many reuses are structurally safe. Critics point out that 36 flights of relatively standard payloads isn't the same as 36 flights carrying heavier, more demanding cargo. The wear is real. The question of where the ceiling is — nobody outside SpaceX knows.

The Landing Never Gets Old

Eight minutes after liftoff this morning, B1067 will be travelling at around 2 km/s — roughly Mach 6 — on its way back toward Earth. It will fire three of its nine Merlin engines for a retro-burn. Titanium grid fins will steer it through the upper atmosphere. Then it will slow to a hover and land on a drone ship called A Shortfall of Gravitas, somewhere in the Atlantic — with no human pilot at the controls.

The drone ship moves independently, adjusting its position to meet the booster mid-descent. The rocket steers itself. The whole sequence happens faster than most people's morning commute.

What Comes After 36?

SpaceX hasn't publicly named a maximum. Internal targets, according to multiple reports over the years, have reportedly aimed at 100 flights per booster — a number that, when it was first floated in 2016, sounded like science fiction. The trajectory toward it doesn't.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world is scrambling to catch up. Europe is redesigning Ariane 6 with reusability in mind. China is testing its own vertical-landing systems. United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur was built with partial reusability concepts from day one. The entire global launch architecture has restructured itself around a principle that was proven in a Florida field in December 2015.

One booster landed. The industry changed. Now the record stands at 36.

As B1067 ascends this morning, you can follow its trajectory on the SkyLens live tracker — filter for the Falcon 9 groundtrack launching southeast from Cape Canaveral, and watch the booster return arc bloom back toward the Atlantic landing zone about eight minutes in.

Want more stories about what's changing in orbit right now? Read more on the SkyLens blog.