It looks like SpaceX did all the things this yr however launch 100 occasions.
On Thursday evening, the launch firm despatched two extra rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world’s strongest rocket in business service, carrying the US army’s X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy House Heart at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Lower than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off just a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Web satellites.
The Falcon Heavy’s two facet boosters and the Falcon 9’s first stage landed again on Earth for reuse.
These had been SpaceX’s ultimate launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the yr with 98 flights, together with 91 Falcon 9s, 5 Falcon Heavy rockets, and two take a look at launches of the enormous new Tremendous Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights had been unfold throughout 4 launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, set a objective of 100 launches this yr, up from the corporate’s earlier report of 61 in 2022. For some time, it seemed like SpaceX was on observe to perform the feat, however a spate of unhealthy climate and technical issues with the ultimate Falcon Heavy launch of the yr stored the corporate in need of 100 flights.
King of ‘upmass’
“Congrats to your entire Falcon crew at SpaceX on a report breaking 96 launches in 2023!” wrote Jon Edwards, vp of Falcon launch autos at SpaceX, on the social media platform X. “I bear in mind when Elon Musk first threw out a objective of 100 launches as a thought experiment, meant to unlock our pondering as to how we would speed up Falcon throughout all ranges of manufacturing and launch.
“Only some years later and right here we’re,” Edwards wrote. “I’m so extremely proud to work with the very best crew on Earth, and so excited to see what we obtain subsequent yr.”
It is vital to step again and put these numbers in context. No different household of orbit-class rockets has ever flown greater than 63 occasions in a yr. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now exceeded this quantity by roughly 50 %. SpaceX’s opponents in america, corresponding to United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, managed far fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small Electron booster 10 occasions.
Practically two-thirds of SpaceX’s missions this yr had been devoted to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband community, a constellation that now numbers greater than 5,000 spacecraft.
SpaceX additionally launched 5 missions with the Falcon Heavy rocket, created by aggregating three Falcon 9 rocket boosters collectively. Highlights from SpaceX’s 2023 Falcon launch schedule included three crew missions to the Worldwide House Station, and the launch of NASA’s Psyche mission to discover a metallic asteroid.
In all, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets hauled roughly 1,200 metric tons, or greater than 2.6 million kilos, of payload mass into orbit this yr. This “upmass” is equal to just about three Worldwide House Stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.
