The Falcon 9 rocket is truly delivering on the promise of rapid, reusable launch.
Last Tuesday, the company launched a batch of Starlink v2-mini satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on a Falcon 9 rocket, marking the 400th successful mission by the Falcon 9 rocket. Additionally, it was the Falcon program’s 375th booster recovery, according to SpaceX. Finally, with this mission, the company shattered its record for turnaround time from the landing of a booster to its launch to 13 days and 12 hours, down from 21 days.
But even though it was mere hours before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, SpaceX was not done for the month. On Saturday, November 30, the company launched twice more in a little more than three hours. The payloads were more Starlink Internet satellites in addition to two Starshield satellites—a custom version of Starlink for the US Department of Defense—for the US military.
Every 2.3 days
This brought the company’s total of monthly Falcon 9 launches in November to 16, a new record for SpaceX. (The company also launched its larger Starship rocket a single time last month.) The previous record for monthly launches by the Falcon 9 rocket was 14.
The company’s vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, said on the social media site X that SpaceX plans to attempt 15 additional Falcon rocket launches in December.
So far this year, SpaceX has launched a total of 119 Falcon 9 rockets, for an average of a launch every 2.3 days. The company has already superseded its previous record total for annual Falcon 9 launches, 92, completed last year. If SpaceX achieves its goal of 15 additional Falcon 9 launches this month, it would bring the company’s total this year to 134 flights. If you add two Falcon Heavy missions to that, it brings the total to 136 launches.
That is a meaningful number, because over the course of the three decades it flew into orbit, NASA’s Space Shuttle flew 135 missions.
The space shuttle was a significantly more complex vehicle, and unlike the Falcon 9 rocket, humans flew aboard it during every mission. However, there is some historical significance in the fact that the Falcon rocket may fly as many missions in a single year as the space shuttle did during its lifetime.
Delivering on rapid, low-cost reuse
The principal goal of the Falcon program was to demonstrate rapid, low-cost reusability. By one estimate, it cost NASA about $1.5 billion to fly a single space shuttle mission. (Like the Falcon 9, the shuttle was mostly but not completely reusable.) SpaceX’s internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated to be as low as $15 million. So SpaceX has achieved a flight rate about 30 times higher than the shuttle at one-hundredth the cost.
Space enthusiast Ryan Caton also crunched the numbers on the number of SpaceX launches this year compared to some of its competitors. So far this year, SpaceX has launched as many rockets as Roscosmos has since 2013, United Launch Alliance since 2010, and Arianespace since 2009. This year alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more times than the Ariane 4, Ariane 5, or Atlas V rockets each did during their entire careers.
The increase in cadence has not occurred without a few bumps in the road for SpaceX. In July, a failure of the rocket’s second stage caused the loss of 20 Starlink satellites. This was the first Falcon 9 launch failure since a rocket exploded on the pad during testing in 2016. Then, in August, a first-stage booster landing ended in failure after it caught fire and tipped over during the attempt. This was the 23rd flight of this particular first stage, a record at the time.
In November, however, another rocket achieved this feat. Booster no. 1067 completed its 23rd flight by launching the Koreasat 62 mission into geostationary transfer orbit. Maybe we’ll see it go for two dozen before 2024 is out?
