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SpaceX launches have an incredibly routine routine. On Tuesday night, SpaceX unveiled its 42nd rocket of the year, featuring a new version of Starlink satellites. Chances are, you haven’t even noticed.
Still, the cumulative numbers are staggering. SpaceX is now launching at a rate of one project every 2. 7 days this year. Consider that, from the mid-1980s to the 2010s, the record for the total number of international releases in a given period was 129 years. This year alone, SpaceX is on track to conduct between 130 and 140 launches in total.
But on Tuesday night’s mission, a singular number stood out: 300. The Falcon family, which includes the Falcon nine and Falcon Heavy boosters, recorded the 300th successful landing of the first stage.
That’s a lot of retirement landings, and significantly, they all happened in less than a decade. SpaceX failed to land its first Falcon 9 booster before the rocket’s 20th total flight. This happened at the ORBCOMM-2 project on December 22, 2015, when the first stage booster returned to a pad near the launch site. The first landing of the drone took place just over 4 months later.
Over the life of the fleet, SpaceX has landed about 85% of the Falcon rockets it has introduced. Today, more than 90% of all missions are introduced on thrusters that are already in use. So rocket recycling is a thing entirely.
There are several other tactics for reading about the number 300. The first is to store the fabrics.
The landing of 300 rockets means that SpaceX has retained 2,700 Merlin rocket engines. In circular numbers, the dry mass of a first level of Falcon nine is about 50 tons, so landing all those rockets prevented 15,000 tons of steel and other tissues from being thrown into the oceans, which is equivalent, en masse, to about a hundred houses.
Only a handful of rockets have been introduced more than three hundred times, and all are Russian. Several Soyuz variants have been introduced over the years, with the Soyuz-U being the all-time champion with 786 launches, followed by the Kosmos-3M booster with 445 launches and the Proton-K booster with 211 launches.
Among active rockets, there is no competition after the Falcon 9. Russia’s Proton-M booster, which is about to retire, has 115 launches, the U. S. Atlas V rocket has 99, and China’s Long March 2D rocket has 89 launches.
A fun board game is guessing if the Falcon nine rocket has a chance of taking down the Soyuz booster and the most stolen rocket of all time. In all its variants and since its debut in 1966, the Soyuz rocket has been introduced more than 1,700 times. Nearly six decades later, this continues, and the Soyuz will likely continue to fly a dozen missions a year for much of the rest of this decade, if not beyond. Although the Russian space program continually mentions replacing the Soyuz with a new line of rockets, these boosters remain firmly on the drawing board.
As for the Falcon nine rocket, in all its variants, the booster has been introduced about 350 times. At this rate, it can be expected to overtake the Soyuz until the mid-2030s.
Of course, the Falcon nine rocket may not continue at this rate. Within a year or two, SpaceX’s much larger Starship rocket will begin launching Starlink satellites. This will eliminate some of the demand for the Falcon nine, the smaller booster will likely continue to fly for the foreseeable future, probably until at least the 2030s.
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