One Hundred Years of Rocketry: What Our Favorite Launches Reveal About Us

Robert Goddard fired the world's first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, from a snow-dusted farm in Auburn, Massachusetts. It flew for two and a half seconds, reached an altitude of about 12.5 meters, and landed 56 meters away in a cabbage patch. Nobody outside a small circle of witnesses paid much attention. A century later, the descendants of that sputtering contraption are landing themselves back on launchpads, carrying tourists to the edge of space, and sparking geopolitical rivalries that would have seemed like science fiction to Goddard himself. The distance between that cabbage patch and a SpaceX booster catching itself mid-air on robotic arms is, in some ways, the defining technological arc of the modern era.

When Ars Technica staffers were asked to name their favorite rocket launches from that hundred-year span, the answers were revealing not just as a matter of personal taste but as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. The launches people choose to love say something about what they believe rockets are actually for. Some gravitated toward the Apollo missions, toward the raw audacity of sending human beings to another world on hardware that was, by any honest assessment, terrifyingly underbuilt for the task. Others chose more recent milestones: the first time a Falcon 9 booster landed upright, or the image of Elon Musk's red Tesla Roadster drifting past Earth on a trajectory toward the asteroid belt, a piece of performance art disguised as an engineering test.

One sentiment that surfaced in those reflections carries unusual weight: the recognition that proximity to a rocket launch is not a comfortable experience. "I realized that if something went wrong up there, things might go very badly down here." That observation, spare and almost offhand, captures something that sanitized coverage of the space industry tends to smooth over. Rockets are controlled explosions. The engineering that makes them reliable is extraordinary, but the underlying physics is unforgiving, and the communities, ecosystems, and infrastructure that sit beneath launch corridors exist in a relationship with that risk that is rarely examined with much honesty.

A century of rocketry is also a century of institutional memory, and that memory is uneven. The early Cold War space race was driven by governments with essentially unlimited political will and defense budgets that treated rocket development as an existential priority. The Saturn V, which remains the most powerful rocket ever flown successfully, was a product of that era: a machine built by 400,000 people, discarded after a single use, and never replicated. For decades after Apollo, the dominant logic of spaceflight was consolidation and caution, a retreat from ambition that left human beings orbiting no higher than the International Space Station for fifty years.

The shift that began in the 2010s with the rise of commercial launch providers, particularly SpaceX, represented something more than a change in business model. It was a philosophical rupture. The argument that reusability could make rockets more like aircraft than like artillery shells had been made before, but SpaceX was the first organization to actually prove it at scale. The Falcon 9's booster recovery program, which began sticking landings consistently from 2016 onward, did not just reduce launch costs. It changed what people believed was possible, and that shift in belief is arguably as consequential as the engineering itself.

The democratization of launch access that follows from cheaper, reusable rockets carries consequences that extend well beyond the space industry. As launch costs fall, the barrier to placing objects in orbit drops with them. That is genuinely exciting for scientific research, for global communications infrastructure, and for the kinds of small-satellite startups that would have been impossible a decade ago. But it also means that the orbital environment is filling up faster than any governance framework can track. The Kessler syndrome, the theoretical cascade in which a critical density of orbital debris triggers a chain reaction of collisions that renders certain orbital shells unusable, moves from thought experiment toward engineering constraint as the number of objects in low Earth orbit climbs into the tens of thousands.

Goddard's cabbage patch is a long way from that problem, but the line connecting them is unbroken. Every launch that people chose as a favorite, every moment of awe or terror or national pride that rockets have generated over a hundred years, has deposited something in orbit or in the cultural atmosphere. The next century of rocketry will be shaped less by whether we can get things up there and more by whether we have the collective wisdom to manage what we leave behind. That is not a question any single launch can answer, but it is the question that the centenary of rocketry quietly insists we start taking seriously.