In the big picture view, the three launches I had posted about taking place on
Valentine's Day all took place and all were successful. All that
happened was they shifted in the times and the order in which they launched.
Does that really matter? Who's counting?
Instead of starting just after midnight Wednesday morning with the launch of the IM-1 mission to the moon, followed by the USSF-124 mission about 16-1/2 hours later in the late afternoon and then a Starlink mission from Vandenberg on Wednesday night, the order got jumbled. The USSF-124 mission was first at the listed time, (5:30 PM ET on Wednesday); the IM-1 mission went to second at 1:05 AM ET after its 24 hour delay and the final mission was the Starlink 7-14 mission from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:34 PM ET after its delay. Notice how it was all three launches in about a 26 hour span rather than the original 24 hours. Again; does that really matter?
The last launch was their 15th launch of the year. This is the 7th week. That works out to them getting around 110 to 115 for the year, when their stated goal was higher. That's the only negative I see here.
An added historic note was that the last of those three was the 300th Falcon 9 mission - although there's some influence there of who counts the missions or which missions count (note: Wikipedia shows it as 300). The NASA Spaceflight narrators for that mission discuss that briefly in the opening few minutes of their hour-long coverage. I think we've posted before that every mission SpaceX flies is some sort of record.
I think they're so far ahead of everybody else's number of consecutive missions without a failure that it's going to be a long time until that record gets challenged.
Or, it's not so extraordinary, and this is just the way people will do the launch business from here on out. NASA isn't really that tough an act to follow, and their most infamous mistakes were from pushing too hard, and relegating safety to the back seat. In another car.
ReplyDeleteKind of like the commercial passenger flights-with-no-deaths tally:
Once you root out all the mistakes, and take the appropriate precautions not to repeat them, it's more like driving a bus than an Indy car.