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The main reason SpaceX chose a methane-fueled engine wasn't really about efficiency. Rather, it comes from a more practical consideration: methane is plentiful on Mars, which is the final destination of Starship. //
Like the BE-4, the Raptor uses a staged combustion scheme to achieve better fuel efficiency. However, the Raptor has a full-flow, twin-shaft configuration. This means the Raptor has double the number of pre-burners, each driving a single propellant pump. What SpaceX got out of this design is greater reliability and safety.
The downside is that the engine is also far more complicated to build. Thankfully, over the years, SpaceX has simplified and iterated on the engine with each hot-fire test. Today, the latest version of the Raptor (Raptor 3), isn't just cheaper than the first one, it also has nearly 50% the nominal thrust — increasing from 408,000 pound-force at sea level on the Raptor 1, to almost 593,000 pound-force on the Raptor 3. //
However, while the design of the BE-4 has remained largely unchanged since its conception point in 2011, the Raptor series has gotten to its third iteration. The Raptor 3 — the latest version — was a complete redesign of the engine to make it smaller, more streamlined, reliable, and most importantly, offering more thrust. The Raptor 3 can deliver up to 593,000 pound-force of thrust, making it by far the most powerful Methalox engine ever. With 33 Raptor cores powering the Super Heavy first stage of Starship, SpaceX's massive launch system can bring up to 330,000 pounds to orbit, dwarfing Vulcan's best by nearly five times. //
Efficiency is everything in rocketry, which is why specific impulse (Isp) is such a big deal in this field. Simply put, this number represents the amount of thrust an engine can generate when burning a certain amount of propellant over a set period — typically in seconds. The higher the Isp of a particular rocket engine, the more efficient it is since it can produce more thrust, while consuming less fuel.
According to measurements made by Everyday Astronaut, the Isp for the BE-4 sits at around 310 seconds, while the initial version of the Raptor goes up to 330 seconds. The 20-second difference may not sound like much for most of us, it's actually very important for a rocket engine.
Basically, when you attach the two engines to the same rocket, each carrying an equal amount of propellant, the Raptor will be able to burn for 20 extra seconds compared to the BE-4. //
There's also the matter of availability. SpaceX is churning out one Raptor engine core per day at their in-house manufacturing plant in McGregor, Texas. Meanwhile, the BE-4 has (infamously) encountered troubles during development and production, resulting in a four-year delay in the engine's launch. In fact, it was because of all the issues surrounding the BE-4 that ULA had to postpone the launch of their flagship Vulcan rocket several times. And since the Vulcan's maiden flight in January, it has been the only time the BE-4 has been used in a realistic launch mission so far.
As for the Raptor? It performed brilliantly in the last few tests of the Starship system.
Clearing blocked filters and clogged valves is the order of the day. //
SpaceX is targeting June 5 for the next flight of its massive Starship rocket, the company said Friday.
The highly anticipated test flight— the fourth in a program to bring Starship to operational readiness and make progress toward its eventual reuse—will seek to demonstrate the ability of the Super Heavy first stage to make a soft landing in the Gulf of Mexico and for the Starship upper stage to make a controlled reentry through Earth's atmosphere before it falls into the Indian Ocean. //
Glorified Desktop Support Ars Praetorian
5y
547.
jhodge said:
Valves are the devil's own devices, aren't they?
I'm very curious about the clogged filters
I'm going to guess air. Tanks aren't a vacuum when the LOX is pumped in (although they are perhaps flushed with an inert gas). Dry ice is warmer than LOX. There might be other avenues where air enters the system, and then you have dry ice slush that could clog filters.
NASA's senior leaders in human spaceflight gathered for a momentous meeting at the agency's headquarters in Washington, DC, almost exactly 10 years ago. //
. Now, with the shuttle's retirement, these princely figures in the human spaceflight community were tasked with selecting a replacement vehicle to send astronauts to the orbiting laboratory.
Boeing was the easy favorite. The majority of engineers and other participants in the meeting argued that Boeing alone should win a contract worth billions of dollars to develop a crew capsule. Only toward the end did a few voices speak up in favor of a second contender, SpaceX. At the meeting's conclusion, NASA's chief of human spaceflight at the time, William Gerstenmaier, decided to hold off on making a final decision.
A few months later, NASA publicly announced its choice. Boeing would receive $4.2 billion to develop a "commercial crew" transportation system, and SpaceX would get $2.6 billion. It was not a total victory for Boeing, which had lobbied hard to win all of the funding. But the company still walked away with nearly two-thirds of the money and the widespread presumption that it would easily beat SpaceX to the space station.
The sense of triumph would prove to be fleeting. Boeing decisively lost the commercial crew space race, and it proved to be a very costly affair. //
So what happened? How did Boeing, the gold standard in human spaceflight for decades, fall so far behind on crew? This story, based largely on interviews with unnamed current and former employees of Boeing and contractors who worked on Starliner, attempts to provide some answers.
A Rocket A Day Keeps the High Costs Away asks why it is, considering that the V2 cost about US$13,000 each (1945 dollars) and could be launched at rates approaching 100 a week, that today's launchers cost 1000 times as much. A market-oriented approach to overcome the current cost barrier to space development is suggested. //
September 27, 1993
There's a pretty general consensus that one of the greatest barriers to the exploration and development of space is the cost of launch to low earth orbit. The incessant and acrimonious arguments among partisans of the Shuttle, DC-*, NASP, TSTO, Big Dumb Boosters, bringing back the Saturn V, buying launches from the Russians and/or Chinese, or of developing exotic launch technologies (laser, electromagnetic, skyhook, etc.) conceal the common premise of all those who argue—that if we could launch payloads for a fraction of today's cost, perhaps at a tenth to a thousandth of today's rates of thousands of US$ per kilogram, then the frontier would open as the great railway to orbit supplanted the first generation wagon trains. The dispute is merely over which launch technology best achieves this goal.
Conventional wisdom as to why industry and government choose not to invest in this or that promising launch technology is that there aren't enough payloads to generate the volume to recoup the development cost and, in all likelihood, there never will be.
How much would it cost to find out if this is true? //
Consider the following mass-produced expendable rocket.
- Number manufactured: 6,240 //
These are actual figures for the first mass-produced rocket vehicle, the V-2 (A-4)—fifty years ago. //
... after the war U.S. intelligence expert T. P. Wright estimated that at full production, unconstrained by wartime shortages, the Mittelwerk plant could have produced 900 to 1000 V-2s per month.
One thousand rockets per month…fifty years ago. Think about that. ///
This is almost what SpaceX is doing with Falcon9, 30 years later...
SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday evening, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, carrying yet another passel of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn't even notice.
All the same, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggling. SpaceX is now launching at a rate of one mission every 2.7 days this year. Consider that, from the mid-1980s through the 2010s, the record for the total number of launches worldwide in any given year was 129. This year alone, SpaceX is on pace for between 130 and 140 total launches.
But with Tuesday evening's mission, there was a singular number that stood out: 300. The Falcon family, which includes the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, recorded its 300th successful first-stage landing. //
Landing 300 rockets means SpaceX has preserved 2,700 Merlin rocket engines. //
Only a handful of rockets have ever launched more than 300 times, and they are all Russian. Several different Soyuz variants have launched over the years, with the Soyuz-U the all-time champion with 786 launches, followed by the Kosmos-3M booster with 445 launches and the Proton-K booster with 211 launches. //
Across all of its variants and dating back to its debut in 1966, the Soyuz rocket has launched more than 1,700 times. Nearly six decades on, it's still going, and the Soyuz will likely continue to fly a dozen missions or so per year for much of the rest of this decade, if not beyond. //
peterford Ars Praefectus
14y
3,643
Subscriptor++
"landing an orbital class rocket booster on boat is boring" is not something I thought I'd write.
I remember being super excited about the first! //
Lexomatic Ars Centurion
13y
241
Subscriptor++
Dje said:
Do we know what was the percentage of Falcon 9 launches dedicated exclusively to Starlink satellites?
During 2024 to date, 66% (27 of 40 production missions). The other 13 comprised four for NASA to the ISS (i.e., Commercial Cargo and Commercial Crew) and nine third-party (two USSF, one lunar lander, two rideshares with a total of 64 craft, and various commsats). The relative masses are 430 mt and >55 mt (the USSF masses are unknown).
Pretty much every day, SpaceX is either launching a rocket or rolling one out of the hangar to the launch pad. At this pace, SpaceX is redefining what is routine in the space industry, but the rapid-fire launch rate also means the company is continually breaking records, mostly its own.
Friday night's launch will break another one of those records. This first-stage booster, designated by the tail number B1062, has flown 19 times since its first flight in November 2020. The booster will now be the first in SpaceX's inventory to go for a 20th flight, breaking a tie with three other rockets as the company's fleet leader.
When SpaceX debuted the latest version of its Falcon 9 rocket, the Falcon 9 Block 5, officials said the reusable first stage could fly 10 times with minimal refurbishment and perhaps additional flights with a more extensive overhaul. Now, SpaceX is certifying Falcon 9 boosters for 40 flights.
This particular rocket has not undergone any extended maintenance or long-term grounding. It has flown an average of once every two months since debuting three-and-a-half years ago. So the 20-flight milestone SpaceX will achieve Friday night means this rocket has doubled its original design life and, at the same time, has reached the halfway point of its extended service life.
In its career, this booster has launched eight people and 530 spacecraft, mostly Starlinks. [260+ tons into orbit] //
Remarkably, this will be the sixth Falcon 9 launch in less than eight days, more flights than SpaceX's main US rival, United Launch Alliance, has launched in 17 months.
It will be the 38th Falcon 9 launch of the year and the 111th flight of a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket—the 114th launch by SpaceX overall—in the last 365 days. More than a third of SpaceX's Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions, a number that will stand at 332 after Friday night's flight, have launched in the past year.
SpaceX's third towering Starship rocket, standing some 397 feet (121 meters) tall and wider than the fuselage of a 747 jumbo jet, lifted off at 8:25 am CDT (13:25 UTC) Thursday from SpaceX's Starbase launch facility on the Texas Gulf Coast east of Brownsville. SpaceX delayed the liftoff time by nearly an hour and a half to wait for boats to clear out of restricted waters near the launch base. /)
Part rocket and part spacecraft, Starship is designed to launch up to 150 metric tons (330,000 pounds) of cargo into low-Earth orbit when SpaceX sets aside enough propellant to recover the booster and the ship. Flown in expendable mode, Starship could launch almost double that amount of payload mass to orbit, according to Musk. //
wagnerrp Ars Legatus Legionis
14y
24,910
Subscriptor
Hispalensis said:
Yes, I was thinking of a modified Starship with a detachable nose, so that you can use the two stage boost. I my mind today even with the partial success they have already validated something that looks awfully like an SLS, but in an order of magnitude faster development time.
SLS is a 1.5-stage rocket that carries Orion and ICPS to orbit (or nearly so). ICPS then has (nearly) its whole propellant capacity to get Orion to TLI. Starship is a 2-stage rocket, and by the time it makes orbit, it has already spent most of its propellant.
The first half of the rocket equation is specific impulse (exhaust velocity), which for which SLS wins. The second half of the rocket equation is mass ratio, and while SLS starts in orbit with a fresh second stage, Starship has already spent 6km/s getting there. Again, SLS wins. Starship couldn't even make it to TLI, possibly not even fully expended. But it's not supposed to. It's supposed to be an optionally 3-stage rocket, where Starship starts fresh and fully fueled in orbit after it has been refueled. It's a "distributed" third stage.
Apples to apples, one disposable SLS gets 80-100t to LEO, and one disposable Starship gets 250-300t to LEO. If you strapped a Dragon capsule on top, you would have 15t less that. Again apples to apples, one disposable SLS gets itself plus 25t of Orion to TLI (3km/s away), and five disposable Starships get itself plus 150t to the Lunar surface (6km/s away). If one were so inclined, they could develop a Lunar ascent stage to carry Orion and ESM all the way to Earth return, load it all up in a Starship, land it on the Moon, and still have over half the payload remaining for other hardware. //
wagnerrp Ars Legatus Legionis
14y
24,910
Subscriptor
Super3DPC said:
When payload bay doors moved to open, you can see a lot of outgassing of remaining air inside. Maybe this is why attitude control was lost and Starship can’t stop spinning. Maybe they just didn’t have enough control authority from their RCS to counter such massive amount of outgassing. There is more than 500 cubic meters of volume inside that payload bay.
Their only "RCS" is from venting ullage in the propellant tanks. It's not impossible that they starved the system, especially if they had to deal with a lot of unexpected thrust from the payload bay. RCS depletion would explain why they were unable to stabilize for the burn, or right themselves for re-entry. If pressure is sufficiently low, it may also be a structural concern, though it's doubtful they were in thick enough atmosphere to worry about buckling.
The third flight test aims to build on what we’ve learned from previous flights while attempting a number of ambitious objectives, including the successful ascent burn of both stages, opening and closing Starship’s payload door, a propellant transfer demonstration during the upper stage’s coast phase, the first ever re-light of a Raptor engine while in space, and a controlled reentry of Starship. It will also fly a new trajectory, with Starship targeted to splashdown in the Indian Ocean. This new flight path enables us to attempt new techniques like in-space engine burns while maximizing public safety.
Between Sunday night and Monday night, SpaceX teams in Texas, Florida, and California supervised three Falcon 9 rocket launches and completed a full dress rehearsal ahead of the next flight of the company's giant Starship launch vehicle.
This was a remarkable sequence of events, even for SpaceX, which has launched a mission at an average rate of once every three days since the start of the year. We've reported on this before, but it's worth reinforcing that no launch provider, commercial or government, has ever operated at this cadence.
SpaceX has previously had rockets on all four of its active launch pads. But what SpaceX accomplished over a 24-hour period was noteworthy. Engineers inside at least four control centers were actively overseeing spacecraft and rocket operations simultaneously. //
"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."
“Right now, we’re certified for five flights on Dragon, and we’re looking at extending that life out," said Steve Stich, NASA's commercial crew program manager. "I think the goal would be for SpaceX to say 15 flights of Dragon. We may not get there in every single system." //
This ship has spent 466 days in orbit, longer than any spacecraft designed to transport people to and from Earth. //
Space Shuttle Discovery launched more often, but time on station was much shorter. And those launches were vastly more expensive. Paying for a few extra Dragons is chump change compared to the billion dollars per Shuttle launch.
SpaceX has four human-rated Dragon spaceships, plus three Dragons designed for cargo missions. A fifth Crew Dragon is on track for completion later this year, and will probably make its first flight in early 2025, according to Stich. SpaceX officials have said this will be the final Crew Dragon spacecraft the company will build, and the fleet of five capsules will be enough to satisfy demand for Dragon missions until the next-generation Starship vehicle is ready to take over.
It will be at least several years, and possibly longer, until Starship is certified for human launches and landings. Until then, Dragons will continue launching on Falcon 9 rockets, even if some satellite missions shift to Starship.
SpaceX has flown some of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 19 times, nearly double the rocket's original life expectancy, and is looking at certifying Falcon 9s for as many as 40 launches and landings.
JohnDeL Ars Tribunus Angusticlavius
8y
6,157
Subscriptor
The single bit requirement indicates that this was primarily an engineering mission and not a science one. The intent was to test out new technology and see how it might be improved for use on later science missions.
A great example of this is the Sojourner/Pathfinder mission. Sojourner's mission goals were to roll one meter and send back one image and last one sol on the surface. The nominal plan was for it to roll (IIRC) 10 meters, send back 100 images and APXS readings, and last 7 sols. What we got was 100 meters, more than a thousand readings and images, and a lifetime of 83 sols.
Thanks to Sojourner's work, we now have freakin' huge rovers on Mars that have lasted for a decade, rolled more than 30 km, and provided thousands of images and readings that have significantly improved our understanding of Mars.
We can expect the same sort of improvement from Odie's siblings when they finally make it to the Moon. Per aspera, ad astra!
Altemus said crises like this, and the loss of the range finders, happened over and over. "This mission kept throwing us alligators, and we would reduce these alligators to snapping turtles because they don't hurt as bad," he said.
If one assumes there is a 70 percent chance of recovering from any one of these crises but you have to address 11 different crises on the way to the Moon, the probability of mission success is less than 2 percent. //
In truth, NASA is thrilled with Intuitive Machines' performance. The aerospace industry at large understands what this company was up against and is celebrating its success. Most of the customers flying on Odysseus are getting the data they paid for.
The reality is that Intuitive Machines is a private company with about 250 people working on this lunar lander program. That's a small fraction of the resources that national space programs typically devote to these initiatives, and with all the data it has gathered, Intuitive Machines and its customers can be pretty confident that the company will stick the landing next time.
And there will be a next time, as the commercial lunar landers built by private companies in the United States cost about $100 million instead of the half-billion dollars the government would have spent on a specialized, one-time mission to the Moon.
Here's why I think this is a truly notable success. Consider the trials and turmoil that a similarly sized company called SpaceX went through 18 years ago as it worked toward the first launch of its first rocket, the Falcon 1. Rockets are hard, but so are spacecraft that must make a soft landing on the Moon. I would argue that a lunar lander like Odysseus is as complicated, if not more so, than a relatively simple booster like the Falcon 1. //
Unlike the initial Falcon 1, Odysseus flew all the way to the Moon on its very first time out and made a soft landing. It has been phoning home ever since, sending a rich stream of data. That's a pretty big win.
Starlab is a joint venture between the US-based Voyager Space and the European-based multinational aerospace corporation Airbus. The venture is building a large station with a habitable volume equivalent to half the pressurized volume of the International Space Station and will launch the new station no earlier than 2028.
"SpaceX's history of success and reliability led our team to select Starship to orbit Starlab," Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, said in a statement. "SpaceX is the unmatched leader for high-cadence launches and we are proud Starlab will be launched to orbit in a single flight by Starship." //
Starlab will have a diameter of about 26 feet (8 meters). It is perhaps not a coincidence that Starship's payload bay can accommodate vehicles up to 26 feet across in its capacious fairing. However, in an interview, Marshall Smith, the chief technology officer of Voyager Space, said the company looked at a couple of launch options.
"We looked at multiple launches to get Starlab into orbit, and eventually gravitated toward single launch options," he said. "It saves a lot of the cost of development. It saves a lot of the cost of integration. We can get it all built and checked out on the ground, and tested and launch it with payloads and other systems. One of the many lessons we learned from the International Space Station is that building and integrating in space is very expensive." //
phat_tony Ars Centurion
17y
263
Subscriptor
This is exactly what most space companies should be doing now - assuming Starship is going to work, and start planning based on the sea change that's going to create. There are still so many companies trying to duke it out in small launch where clearly the overwhelming majority of them have no chance of making it. Pivot to take advantage of the fact that everything about space launch is about to change. Figure out what we could do with a 120 ton satellite the size of a space station that we can't do now and build that satellite. Figure out what we could do with swarms of micro satellites that isn't cost effective now if they were 1/10 the cost to get to orbit. Space tugs. Commercial refueling depots. Tourism. Space stations. Solar-system wide internet as a service... NASA has a huge bandwidth problem on the Deep Space Network... even if they aren't asking for proposals, it may be a case of "if you build it, they will come."
I don't know, but when there's a two order of magnitude change pending on the most fundamental constraint of a sizable industry, that's when new players make it and old players can't adapt and break. It's like the advent of microchips, or the internet. Trying to compete with the company that's inventing the two order of magnitude improvement is the last business bet you want to make. Capitalizing on the implications is exactly what you want to do. //
pavon Ars Tribunus Militum
16y
2,100
Subscriptor
Very excited about this, finally picking up where Skylab left off. It had 350m3 pressurized volume in a single Saturn V launch, compared to the 1000m3 of ISS with 15 pressurized modules taking over a decade to assemble.
If you ever get a chance to visit Space Center Houston, you can walk through mockups of both an ISS module and Skylab, and the difference was viscerally striking to me. One was a series of hallways, like the corridors of datacenter, while the other was this spacious open area. The ISS design might be more efficient for the experiments they actually do on the ISS, and for moving about in freefall, but I can't help but imagine there were lost opportunities due to being restricted to such narrow tubes.
Sometimes, success has unforeseen consequences. The United States Space Force and Air Force (and NASA) have, in essence, decided they will simply procure space launch as a service from SpaceX. This isn’t an actual decision but is nevertheless true enough, as it has become the default situation. Cost and availability — the comparative ease of getting a launch slot — have resulted in tremendous business success for SpaceX.
An unforeseen consequence of this success is that the Space Force, the Air Force, and NASA have deprioritized rocket research and development efforts that would foster continued independent space access. Some programmatic officers would suggest there is no need for the government to continue to pursue rocket science. SpaceX is doing the required R&D, so why spend money on anything other than what’s needed for deep space? ///
Where is the basic research that NASA (or anyone on earth) was doing to make it possible for boosters to land and be reused? SpaceX are the only ones in the history of space to dare think of the concept, much less try to develop it...
Government R&D?
There were 96 flights of SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets, plus the first two test flights of the enormous new Starship rocket. In 2024, SpaceX said it aims for more than 140 launches of the Falcon rocket family. There may be up to 10 Starship test flights this year, according to the NASA official who manages the agency's contract with SpaceX to develop Starship into a human-rated Moon lander.
The Falcon 9 rocket that launched NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken on SpaceX's first crew mission in 2020 launched and landed for the 19th and final time just before Christmas, then tipped over on its recovery ship during the trip back to Cape Canaveral, Florida.
This particular booster, known by the tail number B1058, was special among SpaceX's fleet of reusable rockets. It was the fleet leader, having tallied 19 missions over the course of more than three-and-a-half years. More importantly, it was the rocket that thundered into space on May 30, 2020, on a flight that made history on several counts.
It was the first time a commercial rocket and spacecraft launched people into orbit, and ended a nine-year gap in America's ability to send astronauts into orbit from US soil, following the retirement of the space shuttle. This mission, known as Demo-2 and launched by SpaceX under contract with NASA, ended US reliance on Russian rockets to send crews to the International Space Station. //
Hurley told Ars he would like to see the booster's remains displayed in a museum alongside the Crew Dragon spacecraft (named Endeavour) he and Behnken flew in 2020. "In a perfect world, I’d love to see Endeavour and at least now part of that booster in the Smithsonian or in a museum somewhere," he said. //
Early on December 25, the booster tipped over on the drone ship due to high winds and waves, SpaceX said. This rocket, which was built nearly five years ago, didn't have SpaceX's newest design of landing legs, which can self-level to prevent toppling at sea. //
A day later, the drone ship sailed into Port Canaveral, just south of SpaceX's launch pads, with the rocket's wreckage on the deck. The upper two-thirds of the booster, comprising its liquid oxygen tank, was missing, presumably left to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. The remaining parts of the rocket were badly mangled, with bent landing legs and buckled engine nozzles.
Depending on how you count them, this booster launched nearly 870 satellites, mostly Starlinks, plus Hurley and Behnken on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. It lofted more than 260 metric tons of payload into orbit. Its 19 flights match the number of missions SpaceX's chief US competitor, United Launch Alliance, has launched since May 30, 2020. //
"We are planning to salvage the engines and do life-leader inspections on the remaining hardware," he wrote on X. "There is still quite a bit of value in this booster. We will not let it go to waste."
1966: Atlas-Agena & Titan-Gemini ~ 1h 40m apart (4x)
This was the shortest time between orbital launches at Cape Canaveral since 1966. //
It seems like SpaceX did everything this year but launch 100 times.
On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a few miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Internet satellites.
The Falcon Heavy's two side boosters and the Falcon 9's first stage landed back on Earth for reuse. //
These were SpaceX's final launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9s, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas. //
It's important to step back and put these numbers in context. No other family of orbit-class rockets has ever flown more than 63 times in a year. SpaceX's Falcon rockets have now exceeded this number by roughly 50 percent. SpaceX's competitors in the United States, such as United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, managed far fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small Electron booster 10 times.
Nearly two-thirds of SpaceX's missions this year were dedicated to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, a constellation that now numbers more than 5,000 spacecraft. //
As if these statistics weren't enough, SpaceX closed out the year by, yes, setting yet another record. The back to back launches Thursday night took off 2 hours and 54 minutes apart, the shortest turnaround between two SpaceX flights in the company's history. It also set a modern era record at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with the shortest span between two orbital-class launches there since 1966. The Florida spaceport was the departure point for 72 orbital-class rockets in 2023, also an unprecedented level of launch activity there.
SpaceX looks poised to set more records next year. In 2024, SpaceX aims for an average of a dozen launches per month, for a total of 144 rocket flights. The company will get out of the starting blocks early in the new year, with two Falcon 9 launches slated for January 2 and 3.
SpaceX also faulted the FCC for relying on Ookla speed tests:
For instance, the Bureau's decision arbitrarily penalized SpaceX—and only SpaceX—for not meeting RDOF speed requirements years before SpaceX had any obligation to do so. The arbitrariness of applying this unstated standard exclusively to SpaceX was only compounded by the Bureau's reliance on Ookla nationwide speed tests without any notice that it planned to use such tests and even though those nationwide averages included areas that would not be served by RDOF. Even so, Starlink likely recorded the fastest speeds of any operator in the locations eligible for RDOF funds... Starlink has also deployed its service in advance of all RDOF deployment milestones and well ahead of most, if not all, RDOF awardees.