[allenrb]

Mostly the heavy steel booster cases were reused, iirc. I don’t believe the reuse process was ever cost-effective. As for the Shuttles themselves, so much inspection and refurb was required that it made reuse look unattractive.

SpaceX is getting the entire first stage back in mostly flight-worthy condition. Nobody outside the company truly knows how much work is done between flights but it appears to be vastly less than Shuttle.

[bumby]

>mostly flight-worthy condition.

Can you expand on this? I've looked for information on how much rework they require but have never come up with a good explanation. I'm curious because spaceflight requirements are typically very stringent and refurbishing back to those requirements isn't a trivial task. A lot of the cost for Shuttle was refurbishing to meet the quality requirements.

[93po]

I could be wrong but I believe they use brand new first stages for any manned mission because the stakes are higher. And they allow customers to elect for a brand new first stage at added cost. So the standards for refurbishment may be not quite as strict for regular payload/resupply missions because worst case scenario you're blowing up tens of millions of dollars of equipment/supplies instead of 3 human beings.

[Faark]

I remember this as well, generally for nasa launches, initially. But certainly isn't the case anymore for commercial crew.

B1061 launched both Crew-1 & Crew-2, B1067 both Crew-3 & Crew-4 (with a commercial launch in-between). Crew-5 was new and Crew-6 seems to be planned as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Falcon_9_first-stage_b...

[93po]

Nice, good to know. Thanks!

[bumby]

This makes sense and falls inline with how NASA has always ratcheted up requirements as the risk increases. The highest risk level is human-rated flight, but they also gauge things like payload cost and "one-of-a-kind" nature of payloads.

[93po]

I think someone more familiar with this than me could look at the cost of a Falcon 9 launch with a re-used first stage and compare it to a non-re-used first stage launch cost and make some assumptions/ballpark guess about how much work goes into refurb.