SpaceX had a pretty good 2024.
Elon Musk’s company broke its own record for most launches in a single year, continued pushing the boundaries of rocket reuse and made serious strides toward getting Starship, its next-generation megarocket, up and running.
Oh, and Musk has entered President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, wielding political muscle like he never has before. Here’s a quick look at SpaceX’s very busy year.
SpaceX announced 98 orbital missions in 2023, a new record for the company at the time, but left that mark in the dust this year. The company’s orbital total for 2024, as of December 23, is 131, more than a share of the year’s global total.
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The vast majority of SpaceX’s takeoffs this year (128 of them) have been via its workhorse Falcon nine, with the powerful Falcon Heavy for the other two.
And Starship has also been introduced 4 times, on suborbital check flights that took off in March, June, October and November of this year. The vehicle made serious progress in those control launches. Of the most recent three, for example, any of Starship’s elements (the Super Heavy first-tier booster and the ship’s upper level) survived re-entry into Earth’s environment and reached the planet’s surface.
And on Flight 5, which took off on October 13, the Super Heavy returned safely to its release tower, which grabbed the booster with its “chopstick” arms in a move that looked like a scene from science fiction.
By the way, this is Starship’s long-term plan: SpaceX will catch up with Super Heavy and Ship in the launch tower, a strategy that will make inspection and flight of the megarocket faster and more efficient.
Starship’s progress this year is significant, as SpaceX and NASA have a tight timeline for the rocket: It’s the crewed lander for the agency’s Artemis 3 lunar mission, which is lately scheduled to lift off in mid-2027.
And SpaceX has plans for the megarocket beyond that effort. The company sees Starship’s combination of strength and overall reusability as a breakthrough that will make the colonization of Mars, a longtime dream of Musk’s, economically viable.
Speaking of reuse, SpaceX set a new Falcon 9 record this year: On Dec. 4, the company launched a mission that marked the 24th flight for that particular rocket’s first stage. (The Falcon 9 is not fully reusable; its upper stage is expendable.) That won’t be the end of it, however; if history is any guide, SpaceX will likely keep pushing that record forward, to 25 flights and beyond.
Four of this year’s Falcon 9 missions sent astronauts to orbit — including Polaris Dawn in September, which went farther from Earth than any crewed flight since the Apollo era and conducted the first-ever private spacewalk.
But most of the Falcon’s nine launches in 2024 (nearly 70% of them) have gone toward building Starlink, SpaceX’s low-Earth orbit broadband constellation, which currently includes more than 6,800 satellites.
A small subset of this total — about 350 spacecraft — are capable of beaming service directly to smartphones. But that number is significant, as Musk noted shortly after a key Dec. 4 Starlink launch (not the same one that set the Falcon 9 reflight record).
“The first Starlink satellite mobile phone constellation is now complete,” the billionaire entrepreneur told X, the social media platform he owns, on Dec. 5. “This will allow unmodified mobile phones to have internet connectivity in remote areas. The bandwidth per beam is only about 10MB, but future constellations will be much more capable. “
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Musk has been a big supporter of President-elect Donald Trump this election cycle, ultimately spending around $250 million (and a lot of time on X) to help Trump succeed in his presidential campaign.
The two are apparently now quite close, and Trump has tapped Musk to co-lead a new advisory committee tasked with helping slash regulations and cut government spending.
This new dating may not replace anything in the main. After all, SpaceX was already a tough and vital player in government circles; It is the number one U. S. launch provider. The U. S. and launches key national security satellites.
But having greater access to power brokers likely wouldn’t hurt Musk’s companies, SpaceX adds; The scenario raises problems of clash of interests, as several other people have pointed out. And it’s yet another component of SpaceX’s eventful and comprehensive 2024.
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Michael Wall is a Senior Space Writer with Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers exoplanets, spaceflight and military space, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, “Out There,” was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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