SpaceX launches another set of Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight completed its last launch of 2024, successfully placing 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.
The first stage completed its sixteenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Though there is always a chance that China will fly one more unannounced mission in the next day, it looks like the numbers below will be the final totals in the leader board for the 2024 launch race:
137 SpaceX
65 China
17 Russia
14 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 157 to 98, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 137 to 118.
My full annual global launch report, showing the full set of launches in 2024, will be posted later this week.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
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SpaceX tonight completed its last launch of 2024, successfully placing 21 Starlink satellites into orbit, including 13 with direct-to-cell capabilities, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Kennedy in Florida.
The first stage completed its sixteenth flight, landing successfully on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Though there is always a chance that China will fly one more unannounced mission in the next day, it looks like the numbers below will be the final totals in the leader board for the 2024 launch race:
137 SpaceX
65 China
17 Russia
14 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 157 to 98, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 137 to 118.
My full annual global launch report, showing the full set of launches in 2024, will be posted later this week.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Seems like SpaceX is going to have great difficulty sustaining the cadence of launches required to support future Starship missions, mostly because of inadequate launch / recovery facilities. Of all the options for new facilities mentioned, one I never hear of is Puerto Rico.
Given the island’s US territorial status, proximity, latitude and the Roosevelt Roads harbor and inactive naval facilities, any ideas why it wouldn’t make sense?
Ps. Not to mention proximity to the Atlantic Ocean and eastward trajectories, just like Canaveral and Wallops only at a lower latitude!
Ray Van Dune: My guess is that the Puerto Rican government has probably been the main reason there is a lack of interest in setting up launch facilities there.
Bob, I wonder if they have ever been approached with the prospect of establishing a world-class (or otherworldly-class?) Starship facility?
Given the size of Starship, it is arguable that it can only be efficiently launched, recovered, and serviced from a locale immediately adjacent to where it is developed and built. That means a Starship facility would necessarily be quite extensive and generate massive local benefits, probably putting the Brownsville case to shame.
Imagine a Starbase, but with a half-dozen towers, and the industrial infrastructure to keep them launching continuously at the rates Elon has projected. That’s what it seems like it will take, in say a decade!
Ray,
As things stand now, they’ve applied for pads at LC-39A and SLC-37 (with an alternative location a km north of 37 if that doesn’t clear). Those two sites are large enough to accommodate two Starship pads each, and it’s widely speculated that this is what they’ll do. Combined with Boca Chica, that would give them six pads, hopefully operational by 2027 (the big hangup is the EIS for each site, now underway) and that ought to be sufficient to undertake the initial Artemis missions and a decent cadence of Starlink V2 launches. In the long run, they will need more pads. I think they’d prefer more pads at the Cape.
I think the bigger issue is obtaining sufficient quantities of LOX and liquid methane. The quantities needed are, uh, enormous. That is going to require a lot more infrastructure at both places….though I don’t doubt that SpaceX will figure it out.
The thing about Roosevelt Roads is, first, how do you know that the same political NIMBYs who got the naval base shut down won’t try to scupper a Starship launch range, too? The second thing is, logistics. The Cape and Boca Chica are both going to have Star Factories down the road. So it’s just a short trip with a crawler down dedicated roads for new boosters or refurbishing used ones. Anything you do in Puerto Rico has to be shipped there by sea! Hard to imagine Elon wanting to try to build a factory there, too.
Ray Van Dune: Considering that Puerto Rico’s power grid went down today (reminiscent of Cuba’s recent problems), combined with its government’s corruption and inability to fix the damage from hurricanes, I strongly suspect there has been little interest in approaching them at all.
Of course, this only highlights the problems a citizenry causes to itself when it chooses its leaders badly.
Ideally, SpaceX needs a facility near a river mouth where goods can float down to be put into Starship and loaded en masse.
People like to ignore me when I suggest Mobile, but I could see something like mulberries leading out to a launch site with methane right out of an off shore well.
We have stainless steel plants on the coast–and Birmingport in central Alabama–far from hurricanes.
The SLS pathfinder was built not far from me in West Jefferson County.
I think Elon needs to build even wider, taller vehicles–with 50 Raptors.
Easier to float and stand up if made where it can lay on its side.
I still consider Starship too small for what Elon wants to do.
Don’t forget that Raptor 4 is yet to make its debut. Much greater performance will make a difference.. as Stalin said, quantity has a quality all its own!
By the way, I can’t claim to really understand ISP, but is there a theoretical max ISP for a MethaLOX engine, and if so, how close to it are we?
By the way my back of the envelope calculations for the rotational speed of the Earth’s surface at various points are:
Wallops Island: 1317 km/hr or ~4.7% orbital velocity
Cape Canaveral: 1467 km/hr or ~5.2% orbital velocity
Starbase: 1504 km/hr or ~5.4% orbital velocity
Puerto Rico: 1583 km/hr or ~5.7% orbital velocity
Guiana Space Centre: 1663 km/hr or ~ 5.9% orbital velocity
Equator: 1670 km/hr or ~ 6% orbital velocity
So to move from Starbase to Puerto Rico, you gain a whopping 80 km/hr. Oh well…
I suspect that inland launch sites will come online sometime in the next couple of decades. China leading with conversion of drop areas of lower stages to recovery area of lower stages. Trucking a stage back from 1,000 km downrange is a day trip. Australia and Northern Africa have good geography for such if the political problems can be addressed. The America southwest has considerable possibilities for low population overflights of first stages with the IIP for second stages eventually moving fast enough to be acceptable.
Following acceptable levels of reliability of course.
Ray Van Dune,
You asked: “By the way, I can’t claim to really understand ISP, but is there a theoretical max ISP for a MethaLOX engine, and if so, how close to it are we?”
I found this paper online:
https://thephysicsofspacex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/isp-upper-limits.pdf
(By the way, “stochiometric” means that the combustion is not fuel rich or oxygen rich, so all the molecules burn and turn into the exhaust molecules (CO2 and H2O), producing the maximum amount of energy.)
The Raptor engine gets a specific impulse (Isp) of about 380s in vacuum, so it looks like there is room for 17% improvement.
I hear you asking already: “But wait. Musk said in an interview, I think with the Everyday Astronaut, that the Raptor gets 99% of the energy out of the fuel and oxidizer, so shouldn’t the Isp be much closer to 454 seconds?
Maybe, but some of the propellants are used to drive the turbo-pumps that force the propellants into the high pressure combustion chamber. Plus, there are some losses from the heating of the engine parts from all that hot gas in the chamber and the nozzle, where some of that lost energy is used to heat the cryogenic propellants. SpaceX may be getting 99% out of the propellants, but some of that energy is used elsewhere in the engine.
If SpaceX were to use electric turbo-pumps, like Rocket Lab’s Electron does, would they get a higher Isp? Yes. So maybe what we need is a low weight battery, like lithium ion, without the high flammability of lithium ion.