Do you still remember the famous SpaceX skeptic meme «then we’ll talk»?
No one will be surprised by the re-entry of Falcon 9 rockets into space today, but last weekend, SpaceX’s main «workhorse» achieved a significant and very historic achievement: The F9 B5 stage with the index B1062 completed 20 successful «launch-landing cycles».
The event itself took place on April 13, 2024, during the Starlink Group 6-49 mission to launch a new batch of 23 Starlink Internet satellites. The Falcon 9 rocket was launched from the SLC-40 cosmodrome at Cape Canaveral at 01:40 UTC (18:40 Kyiv time)
Falcon 9 lands on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship – completing the first 20th launch and landing of a booster! pic.twitter.com/G0w4IlXzNP
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 13, 2024
The absolute record holder made its maiden flight on November 5, 2020 — in almost three and a half years, the booster has helped launch two Crew Dragon manned spacecraft (Inspiration4 and Axiom-1 missions), two GPS devices, telecommunications satellites (Nilesat-301, ArabSat 7B), 17 OneWeb Internet satellites, and 507 Starlink’s own Internet satellites into orbit.
Interestingly, along with this record, SpaceX has won another — it made two launches from the SLC-40 launch complex with an interval of less than three days. The previous one took place on April 10 at 05:40 UTC, and the next one on April 13 at 01:40 UTC — the interval between launches was 2 days 19 hours 40 minutes (i.e. less than 68 hours). The engineers managed to improve the previous record by about 26 hours.
One of the key differences between SpaceX rockets is their reusability to significantly save money on the delivery of goods to space. The Falcon family rockets reuse the first stage and main fairing. After the launch, the first stage lands on a spaceport or an offshore platform (depending on the mission profile and remaining fuel) using a jet circuit, and after recovery, it is reused to serve new launches. A little bit of history: On March 31, 2017, SpaceX for the first time launched Falcon 9 with a refurbished first stage, and in 2018 switched to the Falcon 9 Block 5 generation with additional reusability optimizations (10 times with minimal inter-flight maintenance and up to 100 times — with partial replacement of parts). Since then, SpaceX has been steadily updating the reusability records of the booster — since then, Falcon rockets have successfully landed 297 times out of 308 attempts. In total, 42 booster vehicles have been flown several times. SpaceX has also reused fairing halves more than 300 times, with some of them having already flown more than eleven missions.
Currently, SpaceX is actively preparing for the fourth Starship test flight, which is expected to take place in May. Earlier, President Gwynne Shotwell called the third test «extremely successful» and specified the goal for 2024 — to successfully launch Starlink into orbit with Starship, return both parts and perform 148 Falcon 9 launches.