SpaceX has tied a 42-year-old record with its 61st and final Falcon rocket launch in 2022. Also marking the latest in a calendar year, SpaceX has launched a rocket.
A Falcon 9 takes off from the company’s Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) SLC-4E pad at 11:38 a.m. PST, Thursday, Dec. 29, carrying a small Earth observation satellite for Israeli company ImageSat International.
Built by Israeli Aircraft Industries, the EROS C3 space telescope is the third of its kind and will likely weigh only 400 kg (~900 lb) at liftoff, more than 1/40th of the Falcon 9’s available performance in a reusable configuration.
Falcon 9’s first stage has landed on Landing Zone 4 pic.twitter.com/kEAYITOoQX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 30, 2022
The extremely light payload eliminated the need to send the Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) drone ship several hundred kilometers across the Pacific Ocean, saving SpaceX millions of dollars. Instead, Falcon 9 booster B1061 took off for an 11th time, carried the EROS C3 and an expendable Falcon 9 upper stage into space, and then carried the SLC-4E back to the California coast in less than a quarter-mile.
EROS C3 was SpaceX’s 170th consecutive successful Falcon launch, 160th successful landing and 132nd launch with a reused booster. But more importantly, the mission was also SpaceX’s 61st successful Falcon launch this year, setting a record that hasn’t been touched since the 1980s. SpaceX has tied a 42-year-old record with its 61st and final Falcon rocket launch in 2022.
Also marking the latest in a calendar year, SpaceX launched a rocket, a Falcon 9, from the company’s Vandenberg Space Force Base (VSFB) SLC-4E pad at 11:38 p.m. ET. et. PST, Thursday, December 29 (7:38 PM ET). UTC 30). December) carrying a small Earth observation satellite for the Israeli company Imagesat International.
Built by Israeli Aircraft Industries, the EROS C3 space telescope is the third of its kind and will likely weigh only 400 kg (~900 lb) at liftoff, more than 1/40th of the Falcon 9’s available performance in a reusable configuration. uses less. The extremely light payload eliminated the need to send the Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) drone ship several hundred kilometers across the Pacific Ocean, saving SpaceX millions of dollars.
Instead, Falcon 9 booster B1061 took off for an 11th time, carried the EROS C3 and an expendable Falcon 9 upper stage into space, and then carried the SLC-4E back to the California coast in less than a quarter-mile. Went. EROS C3 was SpaceX’s 170th consecutive successful Falcon launch, 160th successful landing and 132nd launch with a reused booster. But more importantly, the mission was also SpaceX’s 61st successful Falcon launch this year, setting a record that hasn’t been touched since the 1980s.
Deployment of @ImageSatIntl EROS C-3 confirmed pic.twitter.com/J7KORv5lha
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 30, 2022
The Falcon 9 stands on SpaceX’s California SLC-4E pad ahead of the company’s (and the world’s) final orbital launch of 2022. In 1980, after two decades of gradual construction, the Soviet Union managed to launch variants of its R-7. The workhorse rocket flies 64 times in a calendar year. 61 of those launches were successful, setting a record that has not been challenged for decades.
Only the R-7 family ever threatened its own record, managing 55 successful launches in 1988, but its launch cadence – powered by disposable Cold War reconnaissance satellites – fell with the collapse of the Soviet Union and never came back. Only in 2022, nearly half a century later, will the R-7 family finally have a worthy challenger to its annual launch cadence record.
This challenge to a private company that had to legally claw its way into parts of the US launch industry is arguably one of the darkest possible indictments of US space launch capabilities, given the relative stagnation experienced after the Apollo program. Seeing it. But it completes SpaceX’s achievement with rockets that didn’t exist before the late 2000s.
Similar to the Soviet peak, an extraordinary period during which the R-7 family successfully launched 1181 times over 22 years is a main driving force behind the recent jump in SpaceX’s launch cadence. But instead of the Cold War, behind the rise of the Falcon is SpaceX’s own constellation of Starlink internet satellites. Since operational launches began in November 2019, Starlink satellites were the primary payload on 66 of the last 125 Falcon launches.
In 2021, SpaceX has 31 Falcon 9 launches lined up, 17 of which were Starlink missions. In 2022, SpaceX’s 61 Falcons will nearly double that peak year-over-year. For some reason, the annual doubling isn’t likely to repeat anytime soon, but CEO Elon Musk still issued SpaceX’s goal of 100 launches in 2023.