Falcon 9 v1.0

Work on the rocket started in 2005 as a step up from the much smaller Falcon 1, and gained pace once NASA bought demonstration flights under its commercial orbital transportation programme. SpaceX put the development bill at roughly three hundred million dollars, a figure NASA audited and found far below what its own cost models predicted for a comparable vehicle.

The layout settled on two kerosene and liquid oxygen stages built from aluminium-lithium alloy and friction stir welded throughout. Nine Merlin 1C engines clustered in the booster, so losing one in flight need not doom the mission, while a single vacuum-optimised Merlin drove the upper stage. A carbon fibre interstage with an aluminium core joined them, released by a pneumatic pusher across twelve attachment points.

The maiden flight lifted off from Cape Canaveral on 4 June 2010 with a Dragon boilerplate on top. The four that followed carried real Dragon spacecraft: an orbital test flight, a docking demonstration and two operational cargo runs to the International Space Station. All five delivered their primary payload. On one of them an engine shut down during ascent and range safety rules for the station approach left a secondary satellite in a lower orbit than planned.

Stripped of the capsule, the vehicle was rated for 10,450 kg to low Earth orbit and 4,540 kg to geostationary transfer orbit, but it never flew anything other than Dragon.

Retirement came in 2013, when the far more powerful v1.1 took over. The version's lasting contribution lies less in the payloads it orbited than in the recovery work built around it: parachute recovery failed early on and pushed the company towards propulsive landing instead. A 32-metre first-stage tank from this version became the Grasshopper testbed, which made eight low-altitude vertical take-offs and landings before being retired.