SpaceX launches two rockets three hours apart to close out a record year

SpaceX seems to have done everything this year except launch 100 times.

On Thursday night, the launch company sent two more rockets into orbit from Florida. One was a Falcon Heavy rocket, the world's most powerful rocket in commercial service, carrying the US military's X-37B spaceplane from the launch pad at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 8:07 p.m. EDT (01:07 UTC). Less than three hours later, at 11:01 PM EDT (04:01 UTC), SpaceX's Falcon 9 launch pad lifted off a few miles to the south carrying a payload of 23 Starlink internet satellites. .

Falcon Heavy's side-mounted boosters and Falcon 9's first stage landed on Earth for reuse.

These were SpaceX's final launches of 2023. SpaceX is ending the year with 98 flights, including 91 Falcon 9 flights, five Falcon Heavy rockets, and two test launches of the giant new Super Heavy-Starship rocket. These flights were spread across four launch pads in Florida, California and Texas.

Elon Musk, founder and CEO of SpaceX, has set a goal of 100 launches this year, up from the company's previous record of 61 launches in 2022. For a while, it seemed like SpaceX was on track to accomplish the feat, but a wave Bad weather and technical problems with the Falcon Heavy's final launch of the year kept the company short of 100 flights.

king of “upmass”

“Congratulations to the entire Falcon team at SpaceX A record 96 launches in 2023!” John Edwards, vice president of Falcon Launch Vehicles at SpaceX, wrote on the website Social media platform X. “I remember when Elon Musk first put forward the goal of 100 launches as a thought experiment, intended to jump-start our thinking regarding how to accelerate the Falcon launch process across all levels of production and launch.

“Just a few years later, here we are,” Edwards wrote. “I am extremely proud to work with the best team on the planet, and very excited to see what we achieve in the coming year.”

It's important to step back and put these numbers in context. No other family of orbital rockets has flown more than 63 times a year. SpaceX's Falcon rockets have now exceeded that number by nearly 50 percent. SpaceX's US rivals, such as United Launch Alliance and Rocket Lab, were able to carry out much fewer flights in 2023. ULA had three missions, and Rocket Lab launched its small electronic booster 10 times.

Nearly two-thirds of SpaceX's missions this year are dedicated to delivering satellites to orbit for SpaceX's Starlink broadband network, a constellation that now includes more than 5,000 spacecraft.

SpaceX has also launched five missions using the Falcon Heavy rocket, which was created by piecing together three Falcon 9 rocket boosters. Highlights of SpaceX's 2023 Falcon launch schedule included three crew missions to the International Space Station, and the launch of NASA's Psyche mission to explore a metallic asteroid.

In total, SpaceX's Falcon rockets have moved nearly 1,200 metric tons, or more than 2.6 million pounds, of payload mass into orbit this year. This “mass” is equivalent to approximately three international space stations. Most of this was made up of mass-produced Starlink satellites.