As SpaceX closes for a year, today marks the fifth anniversary of the first landing of the Falcon Booster and the company is celebrating by breaking records of success.
SpaceX completed its last launch and landing on December 19, launching a mysterious U.S. spy satellite into low Earth orbit (LEO), while the Falcon 9 Booster B1059 returned to Landing Zone 1 (LZ) for its fifth successful recovery in 12 months. . Known as NROL-108, the mission was the 26-year-old of SpaceX, which crushed its previous record of 21 launches by about 25%.
Making the Falcon 9 the world’s most famous rocket of 2020 and showing in the full quarter that the annual CAD of 40+ launches is good within reach of SpaceX, NROL-108 also marked the impressive booster landing milestone almost five years later. The first success.
According to NROL-108, SpaceX has now landed on 20 consecutive Falcon boosters without failure, breaking the previous record of 19. Surprisingly, the last Falcon booster landing failed in March despite the fact that the company set that record in 2020. This year. In other words, SpaceX has successfully launched 20 boosters in eight consecutive months.
After a flawless year of landing in 2017, SpaceX has suffered one or few failed booster landings each year – including two in 2020. SpaceX is showing that the Falcon boosters are actually capable of meeting their design target of less than 10 launches. Each, failed landing (and thus loss of boosters) has increasingly unintended consequences. With any luck, 20 back-to-back landings indicate that SpaceX has tracked its progress and hopefully overcome most of the technical and organizational issues that have allowed for the recovery of multiple failed retrievals in recent years.
According to NROL-108, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Boosters have completed 70 successful landings (out of 80 attempts) in the last five years. In other words, of the Falcon family’s 105 successful launches, about two-thirds (67) contain one or more successful booster landings.
Finally, SpaceX is starting now and CEO Elon Musk recently announced a target of 48 launches in 2021 – double its already record-breaking pace in 2020. As affordable falcons launch increasingly endangered species, it is safe to say that there will A lot More booster landings next year.
