SpaceX launches cargo Dragon to ISS
Capitalism in space: SpaceX tonight successfully used its Falcon 9 rocket to put a cargo Dragon capsule into orbit and on its way to ISS.
The first stage successfully completed its seventh flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. The Dragon freighter is making its third flight, and will dock with ISS on the morning of March 16th.
The 2023 launch race:
17 SpaceX
9 China
4 Russia
1 Rocket Lab
1 Japan
1 India
American private enterprise now leads China 18 to 9 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 18 to 15. SpaceX alone leads entire world, including the rest of the U.S., 17 to 16.
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So the pace is now a launch every 4.3 days. Rated out for the year, they’re on pace for, let’s see…85 launches.
Yeah, that’s a little short of Elon’s goal. But that’s still insane: 85 launches of a single rocket type. By a private company. In a single year. And they will land and recover the first stage for all of them. With no failures. And I’m not even counting any Starship launches!
Not even the Soviet Union in its glory days pulled that off. Let us never take this for granted.
Richard M wrote, “Not even the Soviet Union in its glory days pulled that off.”
Actually this is not quite accurate. Credit should be given where credit is due. From 1975 to 1988 the Soviet Union consistently topped 85 launches per year, and from 1968 to 1990 topped 70 launches each year.
Of course, none used a reusable first stage, and of course all had the backing of an entire nation, instead of the resources of a single private company. Nonetheless, during its last decades the Soviets had a very vigorous space industry run by its top-down government.
Hi Bob,
I certainly do not wish to be remiss in giving full credit to the Soviet space program, which – however noxious its ruling regime was – did some truly impressive things!
But I was trying to add the qualifiers here, and maybe I was sloppy about it. They DID have a number of years where they topped 85 orbital launches, but a) they employed multiple launch vehicle types, b) they always had at least a couple failures, and c) they never landed and reused any of the rockets. And this is SpaceX’s real set of unique achievements.
Richard M: Of course all of your additional points illustrate well the amazing nature of SpaceX’s achievement, without doubt.