space
For decades, rocket boosters were thrown away in the ocean after a single flight. In 2015 one company changed that by landing a booster upright so it could fly again.
SpaceX achieved the first successful landing of an orbital-class rocket booster in December 2015, guiding the used first stage of a Falcon 9 back down to a controlled vertical touchdown instead of letting it fall into the ocean. That breakthrough let the company refly the same hardware again and again, turning what had always been single-use equipment into a reusable fleet vehicle.
Blue Origin has landed and reflown its own New Shepard suborbital rocket, but it did not pioneer landing and reflying orbital boosters, that milestone belongs to SpaceX; Boeing builds a range of aerospace and defense products but has not developed a reusable orbital booster.
Reusability's biggest impact wasn't the landing itself but the economics: reflying a booster instead of building a new one slashed the cost per launch, a major reason satellite launches have become so much more frequent since.
space
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