2017 should have ended with SpaceX’s most dramatic launch yet: the long-awaited demo flight of its Falcon Heavy triple-booster rocket. It’s the vehicle that’s supposed to get the company into deep space someday, the cornerstone of Elon Musk’s “get us out of here” plan for saving the human race. Musk first targeted November for the test flight, following years of almost-here promises. But like so many landmark SpaceX missions, it was delayed yet again—this time, at least until January.

Just because SpaceX missed its self-imposed deadline, though, doesn’t mean the company didn’t make progress toward its far-out goals in 2017.

In December, SpaceX bookended a dramatic year of launches from Florida’s space coast with a variety-hour mission: It returned to a newly rebuilt Pad 40, destroyed in a dramatic explosion in September 2016, launching NASA’s first SpaceX-branded recycled booster and a recycled Dragon capsule to boot. That leaves the commercial space company with an impressive tally for the year. Successful liftoffs: 17. Successful landings: 14. Successful flights of a reusable rocket: 4.

And even if SpaceX didn’t get to demonstrate the triple-booster Heavy before 2018, its technical capability to launch deep space vehicles is only half the battle. The other half is doing it rapidly and affordably—and this year’s record goes a long way to proving that point.

According to Musk, the key to building a successful Mars colony is exponentially reducing the cost-per-seat or cost-per-ton of those pioneering voyages. Which SpaceX has definitely worked toward: Missions flown on reusable hardware are rapidly becoming an afterthought, adding up to tens of millions in potential savings. The Falcon Heavy would have been the culmination of that work: Musk envisioned Heavy-launched cargo runs to the red planet using a Mars-equipped variant of its Dragon capsule.

But the so-called Red Dragon mission, pitched as a potential collaboration with NASA, is no longer on the table. Musk revealed in July at the ISS R&D Conference in Washington that Falcon Heavy won’t launch capsule missions to Mars, claiming that SpaceX has found a better approach for “landing anywhere in the solar system.” This was the first clue that SpaceX would be hitting a hard reset on its deep space approach, opting to gamble its future on a larger, more complex vehicle.

Following up in September at the International Astronautical Congress in Australia, Musk presented a plan for an updated Mars transporter—one that could begin with human missions to the moon. In order to do this, Musk says that SpaceX will divert a significant amount of its resources into developing what they call a BFR (for Big Fucking Rocket). And once a few are complete, the company will begin to discontinue its existing fleet of Falcon 9s and Dragons, including the Falcon Heavy.

Musk proposed that a Mars-bound passenger ship would idle in orbit while the booster that brought it there makes trips back to Earth to top off its fuel tank––carrying an entirely different tanker spacecraft. Musk’s vision resembles science fiction more than reality at this point, but this, at least, seems crucial to his plan: fully and rapidly reusable hardware, perfectly tuned versions of the docking technology currently used by Dragon, and an amped-up version of the recovery method that brings home a Falcon 9.

But for SpaceX to meet its lofty goals, and begin building the BFR in 2018, its current fleet of reusable vehicles needs to keep printing cash. And that means making sure a significant amount of its portfolio is military contracts—the most lucrative in almost any industry.