I fell asleep and missed the 2:53 AM launch this morning, but it was the 150th Falcon 9 launch of the year. It was a regular Starlink launch, Group 6-79, and the 9th mission of booster B1090. B1090 landed successfully on A Shortfall Of Gravitas to be prepared for its next mission and all 29 satellites were said to be operating as expected an hour after launch.
I think of a booster with nine flights as "practically new" although I remember when they were openly concerned if they could get 10 missions out of a booster, and the current target is 40 launches. I don't think I'll be terribly surprised if they do the 40th flight and reset to 50 as their goal.
It's a totally new way of thinking of spaceflight. If you were going up on that rocket, would you rather be on completely new hardware like the early astronauts or would "a couple" of previous flights give you a bit more confidence the hardware will work for you. Sure the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules, as well as their Atlas, Titan and Saturn launch vehicles had several tests that never left the ground. Compare that to flying a Crew Dragon that has flown a couple of missions on a Falcon 9 that has flown 10. I think I prefer the second case.
Falcon 9 rocket B1090 carrying 29 Starlink satellites lifts off from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Saturday morning, Nov. 22, 2025. (Image credit: SpaceX)
There are 5 weeks left in the year, with a couple of extra days that will be taken off for holidays, and the average pace has been 150 launches/47 weeks or 3.19 launches/week. If they can make that pace which has alternated between east and west coasts, that's pretty much 16 more launches in 2025. If they made that pace, it would mean 166 launches in 2025. Of course the actual total could be more or less than 166.
It's a little bit funny/ironic that you mention that you would prefer to be launched with a flight-proven booster and capsule, as I remember NASA insisting the manned Falcon 9 launches had to be flown with a spanking new booster and/or capsule.
ReplyDeleteNow they could care less... Funny, dat.
At the pace SpaceX was going, they could launch dozens of missions with recovered boosters before NASA would decide. Correction: they launched dozens of missions...
Delete150 is a huge achievement, a world record, only to be broken by... sometime in the next few days.
ReplyDeleteWas expecting you to comment on the oopsie with Booster 18. Can't wait to find out what happened and what the engineers are going to do about it. Hopefully it won't put the Starship program back too far.
The part that isn't mentioned is like you say: every launch from SpaceX until January will be a new record for "most in a year". When they had that story back on the 12th about a record for the most launches from the Cape what they didn't say was that with two and a half months left in the year every launch will be a new record.
DeleteOn the Booster 18, I really try to adhere to a guiding principle that "first reports are always wrong" and not go too much into it. Which is why Friday's piece doesn't go much into speculation. That and unlike several folks who read and post comments, (to butcher Bones McCoy's line from Star Trek: TOS) "dammit Jim, I'm a radio designer, not a mechanical engineer" - it's way out of my home field.