Coming Back Down: Spaceplanes and Capsules Built to Return

The Dyna-Soar was a United States Air Force spaceplane program that ran from October 1957 to December 1963 at a cost of about 660 million dollars. It was meant for missions such as reconnaissance and satellite maintenance, but it was cancelled shortly after construction began, so no Dyna-Soar vehicle ever flew. It is the path not taken.

The X-15 was a rocket-powered research aircraft flown by the Air Force and NASA, carried aloft under a modified B-52 and released at high altitude. On October 3, 1967, William J. Knight flew one to Mach 6.7, a crewed powered aircraft speed record that still stands, and its data informed the design of later crewed spacecraft and reentry vehicles.

Voskhod was the Soviet follow-on to Vostok. Voskhod 1 carried three cosmonauts and Voskhod 2 carried two, each in a spherical descent module paired with a conical equipment module holding propellant and the engine. It was superseded by Soyuz in 1967.

The Apollo spacecraft was an expendable, single use stack built to land astronauts on the Moon and bring them back. It combined the command and service module with the Lunar Module, plus an adapter and a launch escape system able to carry the crew away from the rocket in an emergency.

Of the Apollo stack, only the conical command module came home. Its cabin housed the crew and the equipment for reentry and splashdown, while the cylindrical service module supplied propulsion and power until it was jettisoned shortly before reentry and burned up in the atmosphere.

The Crew Return Vehicle was a proposed lifeboat for the International Space Station. Several designs were studied over roughly two decades and some flew as developmental test prototypes, but none became operational, and the emergency return role has been covered by Soyuz and, more recently, Crew Dragon.

The European Space Agency flew this suborbital vehicle to validate the reentry technologies built into it and to better understand the physical phenomena of atmospheric reentry. Its launch is recorded as 21 October 1998.

SpaceShipOne was built by Scaled Composites and financed by Paul Allen. In 2004 it became the first privately funded crewed spacecraft to reach space, flying above the Karman line, and it won the Ansari X Prize by repeating the flight with the same vehicle within two weeks. A jet powered mothership, White Knight, carried it to altitude before its rocket motor ignited.

The Indian Space Research Organisation launched this test capsule on 18 December 2014 on an LVM3 rocket, as a trial for its future crewed Gaganyaan vehicle. The reported cost was 155 crore rupees, about 15 crore of it for the module itself.

Blue Origin built New Shepard as a fully reusable suborbital vehicle. It first flew uncrewed in April 2015 and carried its first crew in July 2021, with both booster and capsule landing separately for reuse. Launches were paused for at least two years as of a January 30, 2026 announcement.

Crew Dragon is the four-person variant of SpaceX Dragon 2, a reusable capsule with an expendable trunk, launched on a Falcon 9 Block 5 and returning to Earth by splashdown. Its primary role is carrying crews to and from the International Space Station under NASA Commercial Crew Program.