It looks like SpaceX did every little thing this 12 months however launch 100 occasions.
On Thursday night time, the launch firm despatched two extra rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world’s strongest rocket in industrial service, carrying the US navy’s X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Area 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 a couple of 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 closing launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the 12 months with 98 flights, together with 91 Falcon 9s, 5 Falcon Heavy rockets, and two check launches of the large 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 aim of 100 launches this 12 months, up from the corporate’s earlier report of 61 in 2022. For some time, it seemed like SpaceX was on monitor to perform the feat, however a spate of dangerous climate and technical issues with the ultimate Falcon Heavy launch of the 12 months saved the corporate in need of 100 flights.
King of ‘upmass’
“Congrats to your complete Falcon group at SpaceX on a report breaking 96 launches in 2023!” wrote Jon Edwards, vp of Falcon launch automobiles at SpaceX, on the social media platform X. “I keep in mind when Elon Musk first threw out a aim of 100 launches as a thought experiment, meant to unlock our considering as to how we’d 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 most effective group on Earth, and so excited to see what we obtain subsequent 12 months.”
It is essential 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 12 months. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now exceeded this quantity by roughly 50 p.c. SpaceX’s rivals in the USA, comparable 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.
Almost two-thirds of SpaceX’s missions this 12 months 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 Area 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 12 months. This “upmass” is equal to just about three Worldwide Area Stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.
