SpaceX successfully launches 22 Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
70 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 81 to 45, and the entire world combined 81 to 72. SpaceX by itself trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 70 to 72.
SpaceX this year has now matched the record number of launches set by the U.S. in a single year that lasted from 1966 until last year. And it has done this with the year only 3/4s complete. Its goal of hundred launches this year is still well within reach.
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
SpaceX tonight successfully launched another 22 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral.
The first stage completed its eighth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
70 SpaceX
45 China
13 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise now leads China in successful launches 81 to 45, and the entire world combined 81 to 72. SpaceX by itself trails the rest of the world (excluding American companies) by only 70 to 72.
SpaceX this year has now matched the record number of launches set by the U.S. in a single year that lasted from 1966 until last year. And it has done this with the year only 3/4s complete. Its goal of hundred launches this year is still well within reach.
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
Yes, 100 Falcon launches for 2023 is still within reach. SpaceX’s highest monthly totals this year were in May and September with 9 and 10 launches, respectively (based on the use of Greenwich Mean Time to assign launches to dates). If SpaceX simply maintains September’s monthly cadence during the remaining three months of this year, it will finish the year with 99 Falcon launches.
But SpaceX apparently plans to boost monthly cadence further as best it can. nextspaceflight.com shows 10 more Falcon launches scheduled for October in addition to the one just completed. That is a monthly cadence only one short of the 12 launch cadence SpaceX has already said it plans to hit during every month of 2024. If it can do 11 in October, it will finish the month with a year-to-date total of 80.
Key to this ambition are the five missions SpaceX currently intends to launch from Vandenberg SFB during October – the same number it intends to launch from SLC-40 at Canaveral. To this point, pad SLC-4E at Vandy has been unable to support such a cadence because the transporter-erector SpaceX has there is of an older design than the ones in use at LC-39A and SLC-40 in Florida and requires more maintenance between uses. But perhaps SpaceX has recently done some quick upgrades to SLC-4E to permit faster turnarounds between launches. Or perhaps it is about to put SLC-6, which it “inherited” from ULA last year, into service as a Falcon pad this month.
Apart from possible pad-related improvements, the October cadence from Vandy will also be helped by the fact that two of the five currently scheduled launches from there will be of customer payloads light enough to allow RTLS booster landings at LZ-4.
The remaining 26 days of October should prove quite instructive to we outside observers.
Falcon Heavy and Dragon flight TEL reconfigurations are killing LC-39A’s cadence. They have barely gotten two launches a month from there.
Feels like investing in a totally second TEL for LC-39A, left in config for Heavy would be an investment worth considering…. SLC-40 is kicking butt on launch rate. LC-39A should be ashamed… :)
geoffc,
Agree about a 2nd TEL for LC-39A. But raising the LC-39A cadence would also require an additional booster recovery drone ship to fully take advantage of the increased capability. Putting SLC-6 into service at Vandy will require at least one additional drone ship on the west coast as well.