Followup to Thursday - Two SpaceX Tidbits

Ars Technica's space correspondent Eric Berger brought up a couple of interesting points about this week's Transporter 2 launch and the Falcon 9 booster that lifted it high enough to make orbit.   

This launch continues to cement the progress SpaceX has made toward the viable reuse of rocket first stages. This rocket core, named B1060, for booster number 1060, had previously flown into space seven times. Its first launch was a GPS III satellite mission for the US Space Force on June 30, 2020. With Wednesday's flight, the rocket has now flown eight missions in a calendar year.

That is a rate of one mission every 1.5 months. However, since early January, this same rocket has flown five missions, so it is approaching a rapid cadence of one launch per month. This is unprecedented for the Falcon 9 rocket or any other orbital spacecraft in history. Each of NASA's space shuttle orbiters, for example, typically only flew one to two times per year, needing significant refurbishment between each flight.

Add to that discussion this was the 20th Falcon 9 launch in six full months.  That means 20 launches in 26 weeks, or just over one launch every 9 days, 1.3 weeks.  That means if B1060 is typical, as few as four Falcon 9 boosters could support that cadence for over a year.  Having five or six would give some additional resilience. 

For fun, Ars ran this photo by Trevor Mahlman.  It shows B1060 one year ago, and before this latest flight Wednesday.

 Looks like a new versus used space ship.  The clean streaks are where welds are on the booster, so they clean them to inspect them.

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The other article you know about; that Booster 3 was transported to the launch area yesterday.  I just couldn't resist showing this picture around; to me, it gives a tremendous sense of the scale.  Photo credit is listed as Elon Musk.

This is B3 leaving the shipyard area and getting transported on this beach road to the launch complex. 

This booster is destined for tests and is not scheduled to fly; they report it was built in six weeks.  The next booster is intended to fly and they're still claiming July or August for the first orbital trial.  That booster is currently being built.  It's easy to assume that its six weeks would be up toward the end of July or later, but it's hard to imagine they didn't start with the "needed by" date already known.  They could have started long enough ago that it will be ready in a few days. We can watch and see what goes on by the day.