This afternoon, SpaceX successfully launched its 32nd Falcon 9 mission of 2022, officially breaking the company’s own record for orbital launches completed in one year. And since it’s only July, there’s still plenty of year left to raise that record even further.
SpaceX has steadily increased its launch rate every year – except for a dip in 2019. For 2021, the company has completed 31 launches, the most it has ever done, which also made SpaceX the most prolific US launch provider to date.
In early 2022, SpaceX set an incredibly ambitious goal of launching 52 missions that year. That number was revealed by a NASA safety advisory panel in January, with a caution that SpaceX still must strive to maintain safety amid the increased pace. “NASA and SpaceX will have to be careful in 2022 that they don’t fall victim to their success,” Sandy Magnus, a former NASA astronaut and member of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, said during the January meeting.
there’s still a lot of year left
But so far SpaceX has stuck to its schedule, with nothing but uneventful missions this year. Ironically, SpaceX had originally hoped to launch today’s missions on Thursday, but halted the countdown shortly after the abort was triggered less than a minute before liftoff. It was a rare outage for SpaceX, which has not had to interrupt its countdown in many months due to a technical issue. However, the company was able to hit the ground running today, after a continuous countdown.
One key factor that allows for such a busy launch schedule is that for the majority of SpaceX’s launches this year, SpaceX serves as its own customer. The company is using these launches to advance its massive Starlink constellation for internet from space, launching batches of up to 53 satellites at a time (though numbers vary from launch to launch). Today’s flight from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California placed an additional 46 Starlink satellites. The company currently has approximately 2,600 Starlink satellites in orbit.
Even without the Starlink launch, SpaceX had plenty of other missions to keep the company busy. Thanks to its partnership with NASA, SpaceX periodically sends Dragon capsules – carrying cargo and people – to the International Space Station. The company also has its own Transporter missions, in which various small satellites are packed together and deployed during a single mission. All of this, in addition to commercial customers for SpaceX and launches for the Department of Defense, makes for a busy manifesto.
Almost all of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets launched this year have been vehicles that have already flown, as the company continues to master the landing and reuse of its rockets. SpaceX also exclusively flies the Block 5 version of its Falcon 9, which is optimized for reuse. Today’s rocket successfully landed on one of SpaceX’s unmanned spacecraft after liftoff, marking the 125th total landing of the company’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Now that SpaceX has broken its record, the company continues to move full steam ahead. There is already another mission scheduled for Sunday, July 24, from Florida to launch another batch of Starlink satellites.
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