Where does a rocket land?

A conventional rocket is expendable. The first stage separates a few minutes after liftoff and falls, in pieces or whole, into a previously closed exclusion zone: the Atlantic for launches from Florida, the Pacific for Vandenberg, the steppes of Kazakhstan for Soyuz rockets launched from Baikonur, or mainland China for Long March vehicles. Upper stages usually reenter and break up, or remain in orbit as space debris.

SpaceX changed that logic in December 2015 with the first vertical landing of a Falcon 9 first stage. Today its boosters have two possible destinations: landing zones on the ground (LZ-1 and LZ-2 at Cape Canaveral, LZ-4 at Vandenberg), concrete pads just a few kilometers from the launch pad, or autonomous drone ships stationed hundreds of kilometers out at sea, used when the mission demands more speed and there's no propellant left to return to shore.

Blue Origin's suborbital New Shepard lands in the Texas desert right next to its launch site. And Starship's Super Heavy booster doesn't touch the ground at all: it returns to the launch tower, whose arms catch it in midair, something SpaceX achieved for the first time in October 2024.

Landing is a controlled reentry: the booster orients itself with cold-gas thrusters and grid fins, relights some engines to slow down, and deploys its legs seconds before contact. The flight computer handles all of it; no pilot is involved. Uncontrolled falling stages, by contrast, require closing off corridors and warning maritime and air traffic.