Getting to space is the easy half. Bringing the rocket back down in one piece is nine minutes of falling, burning and steering. Here is how that works.
A Falcon 9 first stage lights nine Merlin engines at once, together making around 1.7 million pounds of thrust. Only that first stage is built to come home.
About two and a half minutes in, roughly 70 km up, the engines cut off and the booster separates. The upper stage carries on to orbit. The booster is now just falling.
Some boosters relight to reverse course and fly back to the coast they launched from. Falcon Heavy sends its two side boosters home together, landing them seconds apart.
Four grid fins unfold near the top of the booster. Falling far too fast for ordinary wings, they bite into thickening air and steer it the way flights steer a dart.
Near 70 km the booster relights three engines and burns against its own fall, down to about 40 km. That is what keeps the heat from destroying it, and what scorches it.
Four landing legs stay folded flat against the body until the final seconds of the flight. Unfolding them any earlier would let the airstream tear them clean off.
At roughly 8 km the centre engine lights alone for the landing burn. The rocket cannot hover, so the burn is timed to reach zero speed exactly at the deck.
Many boosters aim for a drone ship hundreds of kilometres offshore, holding position in open water. The target deck is only about the size of a football field.
Recovered boosters are inspected, cleaned and reflown. SpaceX has now passed 600 booster landings, and its most-flown boosters have each launched more than 25 times.
SpaceX flew 138 missions in 2024, 170 in 2025, and passed 100 again this year. Landing the rocket instead of dropping it in the sea is what makes that pace possible.