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It looks as if SpaceX did every thing this yr however launch 100 occasions.
On Thursday night time, the launch firm despatched two extra rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy, the world’s strongest rocket in business service, carrying the US army’s X-37B spaceplane from a launch pad at NASA’s Kennedy Area Heart at 8:07 pm EST (01:07 UTC). Lower than three hours later, at 11:01 pm EST (04:01 UTC), SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 launcher took off a couple of miles to the south with a payload of 23 Starlink Web satellites.
The Falcon Heavy’s two aspect boosters and the Falcon 9’s first stage landed again on Earth for reuse.
These have been SpaceX’s last launches of 2023. SpaceX ends the yr with 98 flights, together with 91 Falcon 9s, 5 Falcon Heavy rockets, and two check launches of the enormous new Tremendous Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights have been unfold throughout 4 launch pads in Florida, California, and Texas.
Elon Musk, SpaceX’s founder and CEO, set a purpose of 100 launches this yr, up from the corporate’s earlier document of 61 in 2022. For some time, it regarded like SpaceX was on observe to perform the feat, however a spate of unhealthy climate and technical issues with the ultimate Falcon Heavy launch of the yr stored the corporate wanting 100 flights.
King of ‘upmass’
“Congrats to the whole Falcon group at SpaceX on a document breaking 96 launches in 2023!” wrote Jon Edwards, vice chairman of Falcon launch autos at SpaceX, on the social media platform X. “I bear in mind when Elon Musk first threw out a purpose of 100 launches as a thought experiment, meant to unlock our considering as to how we would speed up Falcon throughout all ranges of manufacturing and launch.
“Just a few years later and right here we’re,” Edwards wrote. “I’m so extremely proud to work with the very best group on Earth, and so excited to see what we obtain subsequent yr.”
It is necessary to step again and put these numbers in context. No different household of orbit-class rockets has ever flown greater than 63 occasions in a yr. SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have now exceeded this quantity by roughly 50 %. SpaceX’s rivals in the US, resembling 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 occasions.
Practically two-thirds of SpaceX’s missions this yr have been devoted to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband community, a constellation that now numbers greater than 5,000 spacecraft.
SpaceX additionally launched 5 missions with the Falcon Heavy rocket, created by aggregating three Falcon 9 rocket boosters collectively. Highlights from SpaceX’s 2023 Falcon launch schedule included three crew missions to the Worldwide Area Station, and the launch of NASA’s Psyche mission to discover a metallic asteroid.
In all, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets hauled roughly 1,200 metric tons, or greater than 2.6 million kilos, of payload mass into orbit this yr. This “upmass” is equal to almost three Worldwide Area Stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.
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