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 try, after three failures had brought SpaceX close to running out of money.

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, with two successes and three failures. The name, like the whole Falcon family, nods to the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Its real job was to prove the point: a cheap, reliable launcher that a startup could build itself and fly for just a few million dollars.

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 roughly 100 million dollars of his own money from the sale of PayPal, 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 itself instead of buying them from contractors at a markup.

How it Works

Falcon 1 stacked two liquid-fueled stages. The first stage rode a single Merlin engine, and the second used a single pressure-fed Kestrel that made about 31 kilonewtons of vacuum thrust, which is the push the engine makes out in the vacuum of space. The Merlin is where the real engineering story lives. 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 single thrust number, because it became the base for an engine family that would later lift far heavier rockets.

The Economics of Falcon 1

At roughly 7 to 8 million dollars per mission in 2008 dollars, 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 dollar COTS agreement in August 2006 arrived during the darkest stretch of failures, a bet on the approach rather than the track record.

Current Status of Falcon 1

Falcon 1 is retired, and its flight record is a real turnaround story. Five launches, three failures, then two clean successes. Flight 1 was lost about a minute up when a corroded fuel-pump inlet nut leaked and caught fire. Flight 2 reached space, but the second stage bumped the spent first stage as they separated. Flight 3 failed 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 and made Falcon 1 the first privately built liquid-fueled rocket to reach space. In December 2008, days after the success, NASA awarded SpaceX a 1.6 billion dollar Commercial Resupply Services (CRS) contract for 12 cargo missions, the lifeline that saved the company from collapse. Flight 5 followed in July 2009, orbiting Malaysia's RazakSAT, the program's first paying commercial customer.

What Comes Next

For Falcon 1, the answer was nothing more, and that was always the plan, because its job was to make the next thing possible. SpaceX retired the rocket in 2009 to pour everything into the larger Falcon 9. A planned upgrade, Falcon 1e, was drawn up to lift more for a slightly higher price, but it never flew.

The gap between the flown rocket's roughly 670 kilograms to orbit and Falcon 1e's planned 1,010 kilograms shows the direction SpaceX was already heading: more payload per launch. That tight grip on cost, spread across the rapid launch pace Falcon 9 would later reach, is the engine behind everything SpaceX has done since.

The Bottom Line

Falcon 1 flew only five times and put just two payloads into orbit, yet it answered the one question that made SpaceX possible: can a private company reach space on a budget. The small rocket that nearly ended the company instead launched it, and every Falcon 9, Dragon, and Starlink satellite since traces straight back to that fourth flight over Omelek.

Related

Keep reading: Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy. Zoom out to the SpaceX overview, or open the Rocket Comparison Tool.