SpaceX's Falcon 9 landing team receives inaugural Neil Armstrong Space Prize

By the Everything Space news desk · 16 Sep 2026 · written from the sources below

Image: Space.com

Purdue University formally honored the engineers who pioneered rocket booster landings, a technology that reshaped spaceflight economics.

Purdue University has formally presented its newly created Neil Armstrong Space Prize to the SpaceX engineers responsible for developing the Falcon 9's booster landing capability. The award, announced earlier this year, was handed out at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., recognizing five SpaceX employees who represent the broader team behind the achievement.

Purdue, which counts Armstrong among its alumni, created the prize with hopes it will become a premier honor in space science and exploration. University officials said the recipients embody the same spirit of engineering ambition that defined Armstrong's moon landing, crediting the team with transforming the economics of spaceflight by making rocket reuse viable at scale.

The Falcon 9 first flew in 2010 with reusability as a long-term goal, though achieving it took years of engineering work. The team's efforts culminated in December 2015, when a Falcon 9 booster successfully performed the first vertical landing on solid ground after a satellite launch. A few months later, the rocket also landed for the first time on a floating platform at sea.

Booster landings, once remarkable, have since become routine for SpaceX, which has now completed more than 650 successful landings. Some boosters have flown more than 30 times, with one leading example surpassing that mark by a wide margin. This reusability has helped make the Falcon 9 the world's most active rocket, accounting for roughly half of all global launches last year.

The success of Falcon 9's landing system has also encouraged other companies and countries to pursue similar technology, including recent booster landings by Chinese rockets. Team members interviewed said they welcome the competition, arguing that broader adoption of reusable rocket technology will help expand the space industry as a whole.

Looking ahead, SpaceX plans to eventually retire the Falcon 9 in favor of Starship, its fully reusable rocket system intended for missions to the moon and Mars. While Starship's booster has already been successfully caught by tower arms during test flights, recovering and reusing its upper stage remains a more complex challenge that engineers say will require repeated testing to master.

Written in Everything Space’s own words by our news-desk model from the sources above, and checked against them in code: every number in this report appears in its sources, and no sentence is copied from them.