Cape Canaveral's latest record

All the way back on Monday the 10th, I posted that an expected SpaceX launch an hour later would break the annual record for the most orbital missions from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station/Kennedy Space Center launch complex. This record has been getting set a bit earlier every year.  The complex is the world's busiest spaceport and the launch marked humanity’s 255th mission to reach orbit this year, itself a new annual world record for launch activity. 

So far this week other launches have pushed the global total this year to 259, putting the world on pace for around 300 orbital launches by the end of 2025. A mere four years ago, 2021, the world orbital launch count was 135. 300 launches for this year would be well over twice as many as in 2021: 2.22 times 135.

Ars Technica's Stephen Clark got the lucky assignment to come here to central Florida (colder and windier than usual over the entire state) to watch and report on the launch. One of the things he noted was that there wasn't a crowd of people waiting to watch the launch. 

Waiting in the darkness a few miles away from the launch pad, I glanced around at my surroundings before watching SpaceX’s Falcon 9 thunder into the sky. There were no throngs of space enthusiasts anxiously waiting for the rocket to light up the night. No line of photographers snapping photos. Just this reporter and two chipper retirees enjoying what a decade ago would have attracted far more attention.

Go to your local airport and you’ll probably find more people posted up at a plane-spotting park at the end of the runway. Still, a rocket launch is something special. On the same night that I watched the 94th launch of the year depart from Cape Canaveral, Orlando International Airport saw the same number of airplane departures in just three hours.

I remember Musk saying several years ago that he would know that SpaceX had succeeded when people found launches boring. I don't know if we can really conclude they're boring yet, but they have absolutely lost some of the mystique. While I can't cite numbers, Clark contends that they have become more routine. 

The crowds still turn out for more meaningful launches, such as a test flight of SpaceX’s Starship megarocket in Texas or Blue Origin’s attempt to launch its second New Glenn heavy-lifter here Sunday. But those are not the norm.  

One of the common cliche's that we hear is "Space is hard" but space is still more dangerous than common airplane flight.

The Falcon 9’s established failure rate is less than 1 percent, well short of any safety standard for commercial air travel but good enough to be the most successful orbital-class in history. Given the Falcon 9’s track record, SpaceX seems to have found a way to overcome the temptation for complacency.

You may have heard this being referred to as SpaceX having dominance over the industry when it comes to mass delivered into orbit. When it comes to putting useful payloads into orbit, it's SpaceX and everybody else. Nothing shows that quite as clearly as something like this graphic created at Ars Technica using data from BryceTech, an engineering and space industry consulting firm. 

The first illustrates the rising launch cadence at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station and NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, located next to one another in Florida. Launches from other US-licensed spaceports, primarily Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, and Rocket Lab’s base at Māhia Peninsula in New Zealand, are also on the rise.

These numbers represent rockets that reached low-Earth orbit. We didn’t include test flights of SpaceX’s Starship rocket in the chart because all of its launches to have intentionally flown on suborbital trajectories.

In the second chart, we break down the payload upmass to orbit from SpaceX, other US companies, China, Russia, and other international launch providers.

SpaceX is on pace for between 165 and 170 Falcon 9 launches this year, with 144 flights already completed. That's more than the total number of launches from all rocket companies cited earlier for 2021 (135) and reflects launches from both this spaceport and Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Last year’s total for Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy was 134 missions. SpaceX has not announced how many Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches it plans for next year.

Wait - important update 

Last night's CME impact that kicked the planetary K index up to values we haven't seen in quite a while caused the cancellation of another attempt to launch New Glenn 2 and the ESCAPADE mission to Mars that had been scheduled for this afternoon. I had seen it in the NextSpaceflight schedule early this morning, then noticed it was gone around 2PM.

New Glenn 2 is back in the schedule for tomorrow, Thursday Nov. 13 at 2:57 PM. Also from Cape Canaveral, "a pad or two over" from SLC-40 where SpaceX launches.