SpaceX has successfully completed three Falcon 9 launches in just over 36 hours, highlighting the company’s continued push for ever-higher launch rates in 2022.
In February, shortly after a NASA monitoring panelist revealed that SpaceX was targeting 52 launches in 2022, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company’s goal was “Falcon.” [to] launch approximately once a week ”throughout the year. In October 2020, following a tradition of SpaceX’s extremely ambitious launch rate targets, Musk also tweeted that “many improvements” would be needed to reach its 48-launch target, an average of four launches a month. 2021. SpaceX ultimately fell well short of that target, but set a new annual record of 31 launches in one year, breaking the 2020 record of 26 launches by 20%. However, perhaps even more important than the new record was the fact that SpaceX was able to complete six launches in four weeks by the end of 2021.
That impressive and unexpected achievement would turn out to be an explicit sign of things to come in 2022.
The successful completion of three SpaceX launches in 36.5 hours is just an extension of this feat. In the same four-week period in late 2021, SpaceX completed three of those six launches in 69 hours. Two months later, SpaceX did it again, launching three Falcon 9 rockets from the three Falcon launch pads in 67 hours.
A remarkable achievement of #SpaceX It seems that we are really on the path to “airliner-like operations” for spaceflight.
– Wayne Hale (@waynehale) June 19, 2022
More importantly, SpaceX has also managed to maintain an average cadence of more than one Falcon launch per week during the first half of 2022, completing its 26th launch of the year on June 19 with two more launches scheduled before end of month. SpaceX has kept this pace even longer. As of November 24, 2021, SpaceX has now completed 32 launches of Falcon 9 in less than seven months.
The company’s last hat-trick or triple header began on Friday, June 17, when the Falcon 9 B1060 booster took off at 12:09 pm EDT from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center LC-39A bearing LC-39A , helped carry another 53 Starlink V1.5 satellites. into space, and became the first Falcon propeller to launch and land 13 times. Starlink 4-19 was also SpaceX’s 49th Starlink Dedicated Launch, the 50th Successful Falcon Reinforcement Landing and the 100th Falcon Reinforcement Reuse.
The Falcon 9 B1060 takes off for the 13th time. (Richard Angle)
22 hours later, a second Falcon 9 rocket took off from the SLC-4E base of SpaceX’s Vandenberg space force at 7:19 a.m. PDT on Saturday, June 18, carrying the first of three SARah radar satellites. for Germany and an unspecified number of shared travel uploads. For the third time this year, the B1071 propeller successfully returned to shore and landed on the SLC-4E LZ-4 landing pad shortly after takeoff.
Fog made the Falcon 9’s SARah-1 launch virtually invisible, but the landing was not. (SpaceX)
Finally, at 12:27 am EDT on Sunday, June 19, a third Falcon 9 rocket took off from the LC-40 platform of the SpaceX Cape Canaveral Space Force Station carrying a single Globalstar communications satellite. -2 spare and apparently several secret shared travel charges. Falcon 9’s Globalstar launch occurred just over 14 hours after SARah-1, beating SpaceX’s record time between two orbital launches.
Third launch of the Falcon 9 in 36 hours. (Richard Angle)
Globalstar FM15 was also the 26th launch of SpaceX in 2022, averaging one launch every 6.5 days during the first half of the year. June is not over, however, and SpaceX is still scheduled to launch Starlink 4-21 on June 25 and the SES-22 geostationary communications satellite on June 28. If both launches avoid delays, SpaceX will end the first half of 2022 with 28 successful orbital launches. Perhaps even more significant, after two more launches in the last days of June, SpaceX will have launched 17 times in a single quarter, equivalent to 68 launches a year if maintained for four quarters. In the history of spaceflight, a single family of rockets has never been successfully launched more than 61 times in a year.
SpaceX launches three Falcon 9 rockets in 36 hours