The Part of Sunday Through Monday I Didn't Mention

Yesterday, I said, (Sunday) "night, while the company's efforts appeared to be focused on the Crew 8 launch to the ISS, Starbase was focused on achieving a full wet dress rehearsal on the stack of Booster 10 and Ship 28."  The thing I didn't mention was that it was followed up with two Falcon 9 launches Monday evening: one from Vandenberg SFB in California and one from Cape Canaveral SFS here in Florida.  

That means between Sunday night at nearly 11 PM (eastern) when Crew 8 launched and Monday night there were three Falcon 9 launches and the Wet Dress Rehearsal of Starship.  These missions were at Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg, Cape Canaveral again and Starbase Boca Chica in order.  You want to know how much SpaceX dominates the US launch industry?  You just read of three SpaceX launches in 24 hours.  In 2023, the entire year, ULA launched three times.

Author Stephen Clark at Ars Technica says "We've reported on this before, but it's worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence."

Sunday night's Crew 8 launch, time exposure through booster separation, second stage ignition and the booster's boostback burn to the Cape for landing.  I'm not 100% sure, but it appears to be from Titusville, on the west side of the Indian River Lagoon.  Image credit: Joshua Conti/US Space Force

On Sunday night at the Starbase facility in South Texas, teams loaded more than 10 million pounds of methane and liquid oxygen propellants into the nearly 400-foot-tall (121-meter) Starship rocket slated to lift off as soon as this month on the third full-scale test flight of SpaceX's next-generation launcher.

This was likely the final major test before SpaceX launches the third Starship test flight. The countdown rehearsal of the fully stacked rocket ended as planned at T-minus 10 seconds, just before the booster's Raptor engines were ignited; SpaceX then drained the vehicle of propellant. SpaceX previously test-fired the Super Heavy booster and Starship upper stage separately.

Last week there was a test of ship 28, what they refer to as a Spin Prime test. They've static fired 28 before and did some work on 28 that preceded the spin prime and then restacking.  My belief is that there will probably be one more major test before launch; a static fire test of the stacked Booster 10/Ship 28 combination.  It'll be soon, but otherwise, as he reports, they're close to being ready to launch.   

The Falcon 9 launch of NASA's Crew-8 mission Sunday night was the first of three Falcon 9 launches over the next 20 hours. Next in line was a launch at 5:05 pm EST (2205 UTC) Monday from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 53 small payloads on SpaceX's 10th Transporter rideshare mission. The customer payloads on this Falcon 9 launch included MethaneSAT, an $88 million satellite funded primarily by philanthropic donations to monitor methane greenhouse gas missions around the world.

Then, less than two hours later, at 6:56 pm EST (2356 UTC), a Falcon 9 rocket took off from SpaceX's most active launch pad at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This mission delivered 23 more Starlink broadband satellites into orbit for SpaceX's commercial Internet network. At 1 hour and 51 minutes, this was the shortest time separation to date between two SpaceX launches.

So far this year, SpaceX has launched once every 3 days on average.  They're aiming for around 140 launches for '24, and this will require them be a bit faster than that, more like launches once every 2.6 days.  Most long time space watchers are surprised to learn that the issue slowing them down is generally launch pad availability - including turnaround time between missions. 

"Could you imagine if I had walked up to you five years ago and said our constraint to launch is launch pad availability?" said Matthew Dominick, the NASA commander of the Crew-8 mission. "You would have thought I was crazy, but we’re at a cool spot in spaceflight right now. We’ve got rockets competing for launch pads, so you’re not waiting on payloads. You’re not waiting on rockets. You’re waiting on launch pads now."

We've mentioned before that they were modifying Cape Canaveral's busiest launch pad, SLC-40, to handle Crew and Cargo Dragon capsules, which can currently only be launched from Pad 39A.  The hardware modifications to SLC-40 are complete and it looks like the pad will be ready for the launch of SpaceX's next Cargo Dragon resupply mission to the space station later this month. Once verified, it could be used for SpaceX's next commercial crew mission this summer.  I've also read that the Polaris Dawn mission - the first privately funded and run spacewalk - could fly by this summer as well.  

Remember the mention of "at least nine" Starship flights this year?  A second Starship launch pad is in process at Boca Chica, a third pad is already in Florida at Pad-39A, and a second Florida Starship launch pad is being talked about now, too. 

Remember when Elon Musk said an indicator of success would be if SpaceX makes launches boring?  Do they make news where you are?  I find I forget more launches these days - I forgot last night's Starlink launch from SLC-40 until we heard the rumble.  That sound gets here so long after the launch that by the time you hear the sound you don't see anything.