SpaceX launches 23 Starlink satellites
The beat goes on! SpaceX today launched another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 19th flight, tying the present record for the most reuses of a Falcon 9 booster. It landed safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 space race:
26 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 30 to 19, while SpaceX leads the entire world, including American companies, 26 to 23.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The beat goes on! SpaceX today launched another 23 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.
The first stage completed its 19th flight, tying the present record for the most reuses of a Falcon 9 booster. It landed safely on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2024 space race:
26 SpaceX
10 China
3 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 30 to 19, while SpaceX leads the entire world, including American companies, 26 to 23.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Minor edit in first sentence: “another 23 Starlink satellites”
SpaceX is amazing. Their tempo is setting a new standard. When they overcome the stability problems with Starship on orbit (which appears to be one problem they had on IFT-3), if Starship is launched as an expendable, SpaceX can put over 100 tons into LEO.
It would be safer for LEO for Starship at least to be expendable for the time being.
Falcon is at the very bottom of the bathtub curve:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
Teething problems in the past…yet signs of wearing out that is the hallmark of end-of-life issues.
It took lots of explosions to dial Falcon in.
Even less for SuperHeavy to stage successfully.
But they’re no threat to orbit.
At some point,—as part of the fail-forward mantra—there will be a Starship RUD in LEO…and it is in my estimation less likely to happen at the end of the bathtub curve once SpaceX has given us the infrastructure to clean up space debris.
No—I think it is more likely to happen at the beginning of the curve…where the most damage—and backlash—can be expected.
Now, I think a lot of Gene Meyers of Space Island Group.
His plan was to use shuttle External Tanks (now SLS cores) as wet workshops.
The refrain of all the energy vampires was “Oh noes! Too much foam popcorning!”
—even those ET/SLS cores are largely inert.
But now we saw Starship tumbling out of control and shedding debris, propellant and God knows what else—huffing and puffing like a big boy locomotive….and not a peep out of New Space.
Had this been a Chinese craft—you’d all be freaking out.
And, three more Falcon 9 launches this week!
These guys are just a juggernaut now.
Jeff Wright wrote: “Had this been a Chinese craft—you’d all be freaking out.”
I don’t know why we would freak out. The Chinese intentionally drop their rockets onto populated areas. SpaceX explicitly targeted empty ocean for both Test Flight Three vehicles.
We may have freaked out when the flight termination system took far too long to terminate the first Starship flight, but that was a failure of a safety system. Failure may be an option during development testing, but it is not an option for a flight termination system. Intentional deorbit of hardware into empty oceans is a long accepted method of disposal.