Falcon 1

Falcon 1 was SpaceX's first rocket, a small two-stage launcher that burned liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene, called RP-1, and it was built to prove a private company could reach orbit on the cheap. It stood about 21.3 meters tall and 1.7 meters across, small by rocket standards, and on September 28, 2008 it became the first privately built liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit. That came on its fourth flight, after three earlier attempts had used nearly all of SpaceX's cash.

What is Falcon 1?

Falcon 1 was a light orbital rocket built to carry small satellites, up to about 670 kilograms, to low Earth orbit. It flew five times between 2006 and 2009 from Omelek Island in the Pacific's Kwajalein Atoll, and it reached orbit on its last two flights. The name, like the whole Falcon family, nods to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.

Why Falcon 1 Exists

Elon founded SpaceX in May 2002 with a blunt goal: cut the cost of reaching space and, in time, make life on other planets possible. Falcon 1 was the opening move. Elon paid for it with about $100 million of his own money from the sale of PayPal, roughly $185 million inflation adjusted. That was a clear break from the government-funded way aerospace had always worked and a direct answer to critics of the Space Shuttle's high cost per launch. The design leaned on off-the-shelf parts and on building things in-house, which means SpaceX made the hard parts in its own factory instead of buying them from contractors at a markup.

How it Works

Falcon 1 stacked two liquid-fueled stages. The first stage rode one Merlin engine, and the second used one pressure-fed Kestrel that made about 31 kilonewtons of vacuum thrust, which is the push the engine makes out in the vacuum of space. Early flights used the ablative-cooled Merlin 1A, which protects the engine by letting a lining slowly char away. From Flight 3 on, SpaceX switched to the regeneratively cooled Merlin 1C, which routes cold fuel around the chamber to carry the heat off, a tougher and longer-lasting approach. That switch mattered more than any one thrust number, because it became the base for an engine family that would later lift far heavier rockets.

The Economics of Falcon 1

At $7 million to $8 million a launch, about $11 million to $12 million inflation adjusted, Falcon 1 came in under rivals such as the Minotaur series. What mattered most was the method behind that price. Building everything in-house could turn launch into more of a manufacturing business than a run of hand-built one-offs, with each engine and stage a unit on a cost curve SpaceX planned to keep pushing down. The proof came early: NASA's $278 million Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) agreement in August 2006, about $460 million inflation adjusted, arrived between Flight 1 and Flight 2, a bet on the approach rather than the track record.

Current Status of Falcon 1

Falcon 1 is retired after five flights: three early flights that showed the team what to fix, then two clean successes. On Flight 1, a fuel-line nut weakened by corrosion from salt spray leaked and started a fire, and the rocket fell back near the pad 41 seconds after liftoff. Flight 2 reached space, but the first stage brushed the second-stage engine as they separated, and the wobble that followed grew worse as propellant sloshed in the oxygen tank until the second-stage engine shut down early, about 289 kilometers up. Flight 3 ended early when the new Merlin 1C kept giving off a little thrust after shutdown, so the spent first stage bumped back into the second stage.

Then came September 28, 2008, when Flight 4 placed a 165-kilogram mass simulator named RatSat into orbit. In December 2008, less than three months after that success, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract for 12 cargo missions, about $2.5 billion inflation adjusted. That contract secured the company's future. Flight 5 followed in July 2009, orbiting Malaysia's RazakSAT, the program's first paying commercial customer.

What Comes Next

SpaceX retired Falcon 1 after its fifth flight in 2009. The company later said it could not make Falcon 1 work as a business, and customers with booked launches moved to other rockets or to rideshare slots on the larger Falcon 9. A planned upgrade, Falcon 1e, would have lifted about 1,000 kilograms for about $10.9 million, roughly $16 million inflation adjusted, and SpaceX put that effort into Falcon 9 instead.

The Bottom Line

Falcon 1 flew five times and put two payloads into orbit, and it showed that a private company could reach orbit on a budget. Every Falcon 9, Dragon, and Starlink satellite since then has relied on the engines, the factory, and the NASA contracts that the fourth flight over Omelek made possible.