Mashable: This will be South Korea's first mission beyond Earth orbit and the eighth country in history to orbit another planetary body.

The Falcon 9 rocket from SpaceX has become the first in history to launch a spacecraft to the Moon using repurposed hardware.

It is a South Korean 'pathfinder' and Moon orbiter known as KPLO or Danuri, which was developed domestically. This will be South Korea's first mission beyond Earth orbit and the eighth country in history to orbit another planetary body. In the "near future," the South Korean Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) hopes to send missions to the moon's surface, asteroids, and even Mars, in addition to the Moon orbiter.

In late 2017, just six months after SpaceX's first commercial reuse of the rocket's recoverable first stage, the South Korean government selected SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch KPLO by 2020. A new Falcon booster launch is a once-in-a-decade occurrence, and the company has made payload fairing recovery and reuse a common practice.

The KPLO mission marks the first time a spacecraft has been launched to the Moon atop a previously used rocket. Because SpaceX convinced KARI to use a re-usable payload fairing on the sixth flight of Falcon 9 booster B1052, it saved the institute money while demonstrating how widely accepted Falcon fairing reuse has become. Following a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean, KPLO's fairing halves will be recovered for future use after their fourth flight.

Because SpaceX has already launched three other boosters 13 times and intends to launch each one at least 15 times, it's likely that B1052 will have an even longer career.

A multi-month journey around an Earth-Sun Lagrange point on KPLO's efficient "ballistic lunar trajectory," or BLT, will take it to the correct position to enter lunar orbit in December 2022. If KPLO were to be flown directly to the Moon on a trans-lunar injection (TLI) trajectory, Falcon 9 could have done so, but in the end, KARI chose the BLT trajectory because it saved 165 meters per second of delta-V, which the orbiter could use to stay around the Moon much longer.

This mission's primary goal is to gather data for a South Korean Moon lander's landing site scouting mission, but KPLO will also make an important contribution to planetary science and a better understanding of Earth's closest neighbor. ShadowCam, a NASA-supplied instrument, could be critical to understanding how much water ice is lurking in the Moon's permanently shadowed areas. On the lunar surface, water ice could be mined and converted into rocket propellant depots.