From Incremental to Exponential

INTRODUCTION

The Golden Age of Innovation Is Now

On April 11, 2019, a Falcon Heavy rocket, as it rose in the early-morning light from its launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida, made history.¹ This windswept spaceport on the Atlantic Coast has served as the launchpad for innovation in space since the 1960s—the Apollo moon missions and the Space Shuttle missions all blasted off from here.

But the Falcon Heavy was designed not only to transport cargo into space but also to recover all three of its primary rocket boosters. Each booster would pilot itself back to touchdown, the twin side boosters on launchpads at Canaveral and the larger center booster upright on a bobbing barge in the middle of the ocean.² SpaceX also caught discarded rocket fairings ...