Better than "Certified Pre-Owned Rocket" :-) I agree with the folks who have tweeted they should start adding launch "check marks" to the paint but that assumes that they will launch it w/recovery and then do it again.

They'll definitely want to do extensive destructive testing on the first twice-used rocket if they can land it (or maybe put it in a museum and do that on the second)

There is a lot to learn about how the structure reacts to repeated launches (and undoubtedly engineering iterations to improve future models' reusability)

The title of this article should have been "Used Rocket".

I think it would be funny if Gwen Shotwell put "Used Rocket Salesperson" on a business card.

"Flight-proven" as opposed to those inferior non-flight-proven rockets we're so used to. In a few years, perhaps flying your cargo on an un-flight-proven rocket will be the risky option. I applaud SES for being the early adopters, and SpaceX for always pushing the boundaries.

It'll take more than a few years for anyone other than SpaceX, and perhaps Blue Origin, to start recovering entire boosters -- it's a lot harder than you might think to retrofit on an existing rocket, and those two companies are the only ones to have designed rockets from scratch for it (though Blue is ... ahem ... a little while yet from even starting to actually build their orbital launcher).

Other launch providers are obviously watching, and the Indian space program, at least, is developing technology intended to feed into an eventual reusable design. But some of the others with announced plans still won't be trying to recover an intact stage, but only pieces, particularly the engines (detached in flight from the rest of the stage). That's the case both for Vulcan, the next-generation rocket from United Launch Alliance (the Pentagon's preferred provider), and for the Ariane-6 -- both of which won't initially launch with even that level of reuse, but only get it in follow-on work. (The reuse strategies for these are called SMART and Adeline, respectively, if you want to Google for them.)

Don't know if this comes from SpaceX or SES.

But Musk is definitely good at coming up with 'interesting' new terms.

See RUD - Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (aka Crash).

RUD has been a rocket engineering term for decades, same as e.g. lithobraking (slowing your spacecraft down by smashing it into the ground)

I also like the concept of "engine-rich exhaust" (also known as "the engine is melting").

You can always learn something new on HN. ^^

I only ever read in articles about SpaceX.

Pretty sure he nabbed that one from the KSP community.

Also its not so much a crash as the rocket falling apart.

The term is _much_ older than KSP (going back to at least the 70's)

I don't get the point, we know exactly what they're doing, so why do it?

I wish press releases didn't make me parse what they're really saying. I know "marketing" works, but if I was a satellite company, I would expect my audience to be smarter than that.

I think there are a lot of stories about companies that go "why do we need all this fake marketing crap anyway" and then proceed to lose a bunch of money :)

The same reason we get everything priced a cent short of dollar, despite everyone being aware of the trick.

off topic:

I wonder what the "real" cost of this is across the world? You know, things like minting cent coins and transporting them around, and other things I wouldn't even imagine!

In Canada? No cost at all.

Actually, that's an interesting question: How much more efficient transportation-wise is ending prices in .95 and transporting nickels?

After a bit of googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_debate_in_the_United_Sta...

fascinating!

I came here to say exactly the same thing. You know exactly what it means when you read it, but you still can't help but appreciate it.

Doesn't the US defense industry use this phrase as well, even if in PR over marketing?