SpaceX made history when it unveiled the Starlink satellite on Tuesday (January 21) from California.
During this mission, a Falcon 9 rocket sent 27 Starlink broadband spacecraft into low-Earth orbit from the Vandenberg Space Station. About 8 minutes after liftoff, the Falcon 9’s first tier returned to Earth as planned, effectively landing on a drone sent out to sea.
SpaceX has made such pinpoint touchdowns commonplace, pulling them off hundreds of times to date. In fact, Tuesday’s success brought the number of its orbital-class rocket landings to an even 400, the company announced via X.
The vast majority of those touchdowns have been achieved by the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket. The company re-flies Falcon 9 boosters repeatedly. One first stage, for instance, has a record 25 launches and landings under its belt.
The remainder of the 400 landings were made by SpaceX’s rugged Falcon Heavy, the first tier of which consists of 3 modified Falcon nine boosters. (The Heavy can make three landings in a single mission, but has only flown 11 times to date. )
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Not included in the tally are landings by the next-gen Starship megarocket, a fully reusable vehicle that SpaceX is developing to help humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other tasks. (The upper stages of both the Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are expendable.)
The 403.5-foot-tall (123 meters) Starship has launched on surborbital test flights seven times to date, most recently on Jan. 16. That mission featured a dramatic catch of Starship’s Super Heavy first stage by the “chopstick” arms of its launch tower at Starbase, in South Texas. It was the second time SpaceX had pulled off the feat; it also snagged Super Heavy on Starship Flight 5 this past November.
However, Starship’s upper stage exploded approximately 8. 5 minutes into Flight 7, due to a propellant leak.
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Editor at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. It mainly covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but is known for dabbling in the field of space art. His book about the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” was published on November 13, 2018. Prior to becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He holds a Ph. D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a B. A. from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in clinical writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his most recent assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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