SpaceX Sets the Three Launches in 36 hours Milestone

As expected, SpaceX successfully completed the third Falcon 9 launch in just over 36 hours early this morning Eastern time.  Elon Musk tweeted congratulations to the Falcon 9 team for three launches in two days, but this is well under two days.  

Three flawless launches means all three boosters were successfully recovered - two landed offshore of the North and South Carolina border and one near the launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base - and all payloads were put in their proper orbits.  

In February, shortly after a NASA oversight panelist revealed that SpaceX was targeting 52 launches in 2022, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company’s goal was for “Falcon [to] launch about once a week” throughout the year. In October 2020, continuing a tradition of extremely ambitious SpaceX launch cadence targets, Musk had also tweeted that “a lot of improvements” would need to be made to achieve his goal of 48 launches – an average of four launches per month – in 2021. Ultimately, SpaceX fell well short of that target, but did set a new annual record of 31 launches in one year, breaking its 2020 record of 26 launches by about 20%. However, perhaps even more important than the new record was the fact that SpaceX was able to complete six launches in four weeks at the end of 2021.

When those six launches in the final four weeks of  '21 are included, going back to November 24th, of '21, SpaceX has now completed 32 Falcon 9 launches in less than seven months.  

Prior to this, the shortest time for launching three missions from their three launch pads was 67 days.  

Left to right, time exposure of B1060 lifting off from pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center, B1070 landing at the launch site on Vandenberg SFB, time exposure of B1061 lifting off early Sunday morning from Launch Complex 40 (SLC40) on Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.  Photo credits to Richard Angle at Teslarati.   

These were flights #13 for B106, #3 for B1070, and #9 for B1061.  It's worth noting that B1061 last flew on May 25th, 25 days ago.