Falcon Heavy Fully reusable

This is the profile in which Falcon Heavy attempts to recover all three first-stage cores: both side boosters and the center core. The name "fully reusable" describes the first stage, not the complete vehicle: the second stage has never been recovered on any Falcon Heavy flight, and although SpaceX considered attempting it on the test flight, the plan was not carried out. All three cores carry four deployable landing legs and four retractable grid fins at the top; the side boosters return to the ground landing zones while the center core descends onto an autonomous droneship at sea, farther downrange and faster.

Recovering all three cores is the most expensive profile in performance and the cheapest in money. Nominal capacity to geostationary transfer orbit is 8 t (18.000 lb) with recovery of all three cores, against the 26.700 kg of the fully expendable profile; for low Earth orbit, returning all three boosters to the launch site rather than landing them on droneships yields about 30 t. The catalogue price associated with this profile is 97 million dollars per launch. In this profile Falcon Heavy falls within the heavy-lift range under the classification used by a NASA human spaceflight review panel, able to lift 20 to 50 t into low Earth orbit, rather than in the super heavy-lift category it reaches in expendable mode.

Falcon Heavy's first flight, on 6 February 2018, flew in this configuration. Its test payload was Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster with a mannequin nicknamed "Starman" at the wheel, bound for a heliocentric orbit. The two side boosters returned to Landing Zones 1 and 2 and touched down simultaneously, an image that became the rocket's defining photograph. The single objective not completed was the landing of the center core: two of the three engines failed to light for the landing burn and the core crashed into the ocean roughly 100 metres from the droneship at about 500 kilometres per hour, damaging its deck.

The second flight, on 11 April 2019 and the first commercial one, carried the heavy Arabsat-6A communications satellite and achieved what the demonstration had not: all three boosters landed successfully. The victory was partial, because the center core subsequently fell over and was lost during transport in heavy seas; the two side boosters, by contrast, were reused on the Department of Defense STP-2 mission launched on 25 June 2019. That third flight closed the first chapter of the rocket's life.

The configuration recovering all three cores has not returned as the standard one. The operational missions that have sustained Falcon Heavy's manifest — heavy geostationary satellites, classified military payloads, interplanetary probes — ask for more performance than this profile offers, and the center core is the first thing sacrificed.

Between 2013 and 2016 SpaceX ran a parallel development programme for a reusable rocket architecture on Falcon 9, and much of it applies directly to Falcon Heavy. The company had expressed hopes early on that every rocket stage would eventually be reusable. On Falcon Heavy the two outer cores separate earlier in flight and are therefore travelling more slowly than a Falcon 9 first stage at separation, which is exactly what makes their recovery comparatively cheap — and, by contrast, what makes the center core the hard case.