SpaceX has successfully completed three Falcon 9 launches in just over 36 hours, highlighting the company’s continued drive for an ever-increasing launch cadence in 2022.
In February, shortly after NASA’s oversight panel revealed that SpaceX was targeting 52 launches in 2022, CEO Elon Musk confirmed that the company’s goal was “Falcon [to] starts about once a week ”throughout the year. In October 2020, continuing the tradition of extremely ambitious SpaceX launch targets, Musk also tweeted that “many improvements” will need to be made to reach his 48-launch target – an average of four launches per month – in 2021. In the end, SpaceX failed to achieve this goal, but set a new annual record of 31 launches in one year, breaking its 2020 record of 26 launches by about 20%. However, perhaps even more important than the new record was the fact that SpaceX managed to complete six launches in four weeks at the end of 2021.
This impressive and unexpected achievement will be an explicit sign of the things to come in 2022.
The successful completion of three SpaceX launches in 36.5 hours is just a continuation of this achievement. During the same four-week period at the end of 2021, SpaceX completed three of these six launches in 69 hours. Two months later, SpaceX did it again, launching three Falcon 9 rockets from its three Falcon launch sites in 67 hours.
A remarkable achievement of #SpaceX It really seems that we are on the way to “operations like airplanes” for space flights.
– Wayne Hale (@waynehale) June 19, 2022
More importantly, SpaceX also managed to maintain an average pace of more than one Falcon launch per week in the first half of 2022, ending its 26th launch of the year on June 19 with two more launches scheduled before the end of months. SpaceX actually maintains this rhythm even longer. Starting November 24, 2021, SpaceX has already completed 32 launches of the Falcon 9 in less than seven months.
The company’s latest hat-trick or triple header kicked off on Friday, June 17, when the Falcon 9 Booster B1060 took off at 12:09 p.m. space and became the first Falcon accelerator, launched and landed 13 times. Starlink 4-19 was also the 49th special launch of SpaceX’s Starlink, the 50th consecutive successful landing of the Falcon accelerator on SpaceX and the 100th successful reuse of the Falcon booster.
The Falcon 9 B1060 took off for the 13th time. (Richard Angle)
22 hours later, a second Falcon 9 rocket took off from the SLC-4E spacecraft at Vandenberg Space Station on SpaceX at 7:19 a.m. PDT on Saturday, June 18, carrying the first of three SARah radar satellites to Germany and an unspecified payload. For the third time this year, the B1071 accelerated successfully back to shore and landed on the SLC-4E’s LZ-4 landing site shortly after take-off.
The fog made the SARAh-1 launch of the Falcon 9 virtually invisible, but the landing was not. (SpaceX)
Finally, at 12:27 a.m. EDT on Sunday, June 19, a third Falcon 9 rocket took off from the SpaceX Cape Canaveral Space Force Station LC-40, carrying a backup Globalstar-2 communications satellite and apparently several secret payloads. for vehicle sharing. The launch of the Falcon 9 Globalstar occurred just over 14 hours after SARah-1, breaking SpaceX’s record time between two orbital launches.
The 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 in the first half of the year. However, June is not over and SpaceX still has plans to launch Starlink 4-21 on June 25 and the geostationary communications satellite SES-22 on June 28. If both launches avoid delays, SpaceX will complete the first half of 2022 with 28 successful orbital launches. Perhaps even more significantly, after two more launches in the last days of June, SpaceX will launch 17 times in a quarter – the equivalent of 68 launches a year if maintained for four quarters. In the history of space flight, a family of rockets has never successfully launched more than 61 times in one year.
SpaceX launches three Falcon 9 rockets in 36 hours
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