Rounding out a trio of back-to-back launches over two days, SpaceX has efficiently executed its three hundredth Falcon 9 mission, boosting 22 Starlink web communications satellites into low-Earth orbit from Area Launch Complicated (SLC)-4E at Vandenberg Area Power Base, Calif. Liftoff of the once-before-flown B1082—which entered service simply six weeks in the past for the primary U.S. launch of 2024—occurred at 1:34 p.m. PST Thursday, proper on the opening of an expansive four-hour “window” of obtainable T-0 alternatives.
With Thursday’s mission, SpaceX has accomplished 300 Falcon 9 launches since June 2010, when the two-stage booster blazed onto the scene in its first iteration. Since then, the Hawthorne, Calif.-headquartered group’s flight cadence has ramped up dramatically, reaching its one centesimal launch in November 2020 and its 2 hundredth by the top of January 2023. And with nearly 100 missions flown final 12 months alone, including one other hundred to its tally to achieve No. 300 has taken a mere 380 days.
It additionally marked the fifteenth Falcon 9 mission inside 2024’s seventh week, a mean of 1 launch each 3.0 days. That represents a considerable uplift over final 12 months’s common of a launch each 3.8 days, which generated no fewer than 96 missions earlier than the top of 2023. On the present cadence, SpaceX can subsequently confidently purpose for at the very least 120 flights earlier than the New Yr’s Eve bell subsequent tolls.
Because the maiden flight in June 2010, a complete of 70 Falcon 9 boosters have taken to the skies, nearly half of which have been both misplaced or deliberately expended after a single launch. Thirty-seven others flew greater than as soon as, with 13 having launched on ten (or extra) events and after final night time’s profitable mission by B1060 and Intuitive Machines’ IM-1 lunar lander 4 life-leaders have now handed 18 flights apiece, with B1058—the one-time journey of Dragon Endeavour and her Demo-2 crewmen Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken—sadly misplaced after finishing a record-setting nineteenth flight final December.
Throughout that raft of years, Falcon 9 cores achieved greater than 200 landings on the expansive decks of Autonomous Spaceport Drone Ships (ASDS) within the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans since April 2016 and over 40 others alighted on stable floor at both Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg since December 2015. There have been eight failed ASDS touchdown makes an attempt and a single “land” touchdown failure, during which the returning booster was as an alternative ditched at sea. And just one Falcon 9 has ever been misplaced in flight.
Notable milestones included the Falcon 9’s first geostationary payload in December 2013, its first deep-space launch in March 2015, its first use of a previously-flown booster in March 2017 and its first mission to hold people in Might 2020.
Virtually half of all launches have been dedicated to SpaceX’s in-house-built Starlink web communications community, with 140 devoted flights between Might 2019 and tonight pushing over 5,900 of those small, flat-packed satellites into low-Earth orbit. Added to that checklist are 51 massive geostationary communications satellites, 11 Earth-observing spacecraft, ten “rideshare” missions, 9 categorized payloads for the Nationwide Reconnaissance Workplace, the U.S. Area Power and the Area Improvement Company (SDA), six worldwide army cargoes for the governments of Spain, Germany, South Korea and Israel, 5 Block III International Positioning System (GPS) satellites, 4 flights dedicated to astronomy or deep-space exploration and three voyages to the Moon.
Twenty-nine Cargo Dragons have efficiently been delivered to the Worldwide Area Station (ISS) since Might 2012, plus a single Cygnus resupply mission simply two weeks in the past on behalf of Northrop Grumman Corp. And since Might 2020, a grand sum of 12 Crew Dragons—together with the primary all-private human mission—ferried 33 males and 12 girls from 13 sovereign nations into orbit, together with the primary nationwide house traveler from Türkiye and the primary Arab feminine astronaut.
Tonight’s launch by B1082 was initially scheduled to fly at 4:30 p.m. PST Wednesday, solely two hours after the Area Power’s USSF-124 mission from the East Coast; if achieved, that may have set a brand new empirical document of 120 minutes for the shortest interval between pairs of Falcon 9 launches, eclipsing SpaceX’s prior private better of two hours and 54 minutes set late final December. However as Wednesday’s four-hour “launch window” progressed, SpaceX opted as an alternative to purpose for a later T-0 level, then in the end stood down for the day and scrubbed the try in favor of a 24-hour turnaround to Thursday.
Aboard tonight’s mission have been 22 Starlinks weighing some 38,800 kilos (17,600 kilograms), the ninth batch of those flat-packed satellites launched up to now in 2024 and bringing the overall variety of these satellites flown this 12 months so far to 200. Following launch, B1082 returned to land on the deck of the West Coast-based drone ship, “Of Course I Nonetheless Love You”, whereas the Falcon 9’s second stage executed a typical six-minute “burn” to ship the Starlink stack to orbit.
As a community, Starlink permits high-speed and low-latency web provision throughout 70 sovereign nations and worldwide markets in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania and Africa. Landlocked Eswatini—previously Swaziland—in southern Africa, along with Honduras and Paraguay joined Starlink in December.
January ended with seven Starlink missions from the East and West Coasts, together with SpaceX’s first six “Direct-to-Cell” satellites which enable cell community suppliers to supply “seamless international entry to texting, calling and searching”, whether or not “on land, lakes or coastal waters”, with out altering {hardware} or firmware. Final month, SpaceX despatched and acquired their first textual content messages by way of Direct-to-Cell a mere six days after launch.
The downsized Starlink “V2 Mini” satellites, first flown in February of final 12 months, boast three to 4 occasions larger “usable” bandwidth than earlier Starlink iterations. “V2 Minis embody key applied sciences—reminiscent of extra highly effective phased-array antennas and using E-Band for backhaul—which can permit Starlink to supply 4x extra capability per satellite tv for pc than earlier iterations,” SpaceX defined. “Amongst different enhancements, V2 Minis are geared up with new argon Corridor thrusters for on-orbit maneuvering.”
Florida-based intercity operator Brightline adopted Starlink on its trains earlier in 2023, the primary passenger rail service on the earth to take action. Moreover, El Salvador’s Ministry of Training has begun integrating Starlink functionality into its colleges to assist shut the digital divide between city and distant rural communities and 50 Rwandan colleges at the moment are related by way of Starlink’s high-speed web service.
