To date, SpaceX stands alone as the only commercial company to deliver payloads to orbit and then recover and reuse part of the rocket for use on later missions. This has allowed the Hawthorne, California-based company to significantly reduce launch costs.
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Even without that capability they were still the lowest cost launcher.
I remember a lot of sonic booms when I was a little kid in Southern California.
Cool...Haven’t heard sonic booms for about 50 years since we lived south of Seattle.
From reading Heinlein’s “juvenile” novels, I was expecting to be hearing nothing BUT sonic booms by now.
I remember during the Shuttle days when ‘RTLS’ (Return To Launch Site) was a bad thing.
It meant that things had screwed up royally and they were going to try to return to the Cape. But there was a lot of debate on whether or not it would actually work.
John Young, commander of STS-1, said that “RTLS requires continuous miracles interspersed with acts of God to be successful.”
In other words, everything, i.e., waiting for the SRB’s to burn out, separating the almost-full ET, dumping orbiter excess fuel so it doesn’t just fall out of the sky, etc. has to work perfectly after everything else has gone horribly wrong.
Yeah, right!