Surprise, surprise: SpaceX plans to conduct more spaceflights this year.
Elon Musk’s company announced 96 orbital missions in 2023, a huge jump from its previous record of 61, set a year earlier. And SpaceX is making plans to take a big step forward in 2024, one that will take it well beyond a century.
“Looking ahead to next year, we need to increase [our] flight frequency to about 12 flights per month, or 144 flights,” Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of flight structure and reliability, said Oct. 18 at a hearing of the U. S. Senate Subcommittee on Science and Space.
This equates to a release every 2. 8 days, a cadence that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But SpaceX has a habit of rethinking our concepts of what’s imaginable in spaceflight, so this ambitious goal is quite achievable.
Related: Ways SpaceX Transformed Spaceflight
About two-thirds of SpaceX’s launches in 2023 were dedicated to building Starlink, the company’s mega satellite constellation. This trend will most likely continue until 2024, as the network is far from complete.
Starlink currently has about 5,230 operational spacecraft, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. But SpaceX has permission to deploy a total of 12,000 Starlink satellites into low-Earth orbit (LEO), and the company has applied for approval for 30,000.
Therefore, batches of Starlink are expected to continue flying from either coast — Vandenberg Space Force Base in California and the Cape Canaveral Space Station and Kennedy Space Center in Florida — through 2024.
We’ll see more SpaceX astronaut launches this year.
The company announced three crewed missions to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2023: two for NASA and one for Axiom Space, a Houston-based company that aims to create its own LEO outpost within many years.
SpaceX will send five astronaut missions skyward this year, if all goes according to plan. The Crew-8 and Crew-9 flights for NASA are scheduled to lift off in February and August, respectively. Axiom’s Ax-3 mission will launch on Jan. 17, and Ax-4 is targeted for no earlier than October. And, in April, SpaceX plans to launch Polaris Dawn, a free-flying mission to LEO that will feature the first-ever spacewalk by a private astronaut.
Related: SpaceX’s Ax-2 project for Axiom Space in pictures (gallery)
Ninety-one of SpaceX’s nine-six orbital missions last year were made via its Falcon rocket, with the company’s rugged Falcon Heavy accounting for the other five.
But 2023 also featured two test flights of the launcher that SpaceX thinks will spur a revolution in spaceflight and exploration — Starship, the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built.
Both the Falcon nine and Falcon Heavy feature reusable first stages, a major advance in spaceflight technology. But Starship, which stands about 122 meters tall when fully stacked, is designed to be completely reusable. That’s because Musk needs Starship’s massive Super Heavy booster to land at its launch stand after liftoff, to allow for quick inspection, reconditioning and reflight.
The two Starship verification flights lifted off from SpaceX’s Starbase facility in South Texas in April and November of last year, respectively. Both missions aimed to send the vehicle’s upper level almost around Earth, with a targeted landing in a part of the Pacific near Hawaii.
The April flight didn’t last long. Starship experienced several serious problems, in addition to its two stages not separating, and SpaceX deliberately destroyed the free-falling vehicle just 4 minutes after liftoff.
Starship advanced on its second flight; The Super Heavy’s 33 Raptor engines all went according to plan and the propeller were effectively separated from the top tier. But that project also ended prematurely, with the destruction of the upper level about 8 minutes into the flight.
We shouldn’t have to wait long for flight number three. Last week, SpaceX tested the engines for its new Starship prototype, which it plans to launch as soon as it gets a license from the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA is lately overseeing an investigation into what happened on the November Starship flight. )
SpaceX is also working to get other Starship vehicles ready, in keeping with the company’s development philosophy, which prioritizes frequent test flights and rapid iteration.
“I think maybe by the end of the year they’ll have it figured out. Not in the pace, but simply demonstrating reuse,” said Justus Parmar, chief executive of venture capital and advisory firm Fortuna Investments, which focuses primarily on the local industry. , he said of SpaceX’s efforts on Starship. So, it’s going to be huge. “
Time is running out for Starship. La NASA has selected this giant rover as the first crewed lander for its Artemis program, which aims to identify a permanent and sustainable human presence on and around the Moon through the late 2020s. The plan calls for Starship to take astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time as part of the Artemis 3 mission, which is recently scheduled to lift off in late 2025 or 2026.
Related: NASA’s Artemis Program: Everything You Need to Know
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The past two years have been challenging for investors in most areas, and no exception.
“Growth has been crushed,” Parmar told Space. com. “Everything is down 70 to 70 percent. “
But he sees a turnaround coming. Money will start flowing into the space ecosystem in a serious way again this year, potentially leading to a “banner year” in 2025, Parmar predicts.
“Technology has never been more advanced, and yet we have valuations that, to some extent, are the lowest they’ve ever been. So I think this setup with new capital is promising,” he said.
Low costs and immediate technological advancements are the only points that can move the needle. The continued good fortune of SpaceX, which dominates the personal spaceflight industry, shows investors that money can be made in the last frontier. And that’s essential, according to Parmar.
“In each and every emerging or booming industry, you want a trailblazer, you want a story of good fortune,” he said. “If there are no winners in the industry, no one will ever help it. “
Google pioneered in the early 2000s, when investors needed good luck after the dot-com bubble burst, Parmar said. Google ended up reshaping the entire web economy, and SpaceX may do something similar in the final frontier.
In other words, SpaceX will be the only spaceflight company to have a wonderful 2024. Parmar believes Blue Origin, founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos in 2000, is poised for a historic year.
Blue Origin just got a new CEO — Dave Limp, who had been Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services. In addition, Bezos recently announced that he’s moving from Seattle to Miami. He broke the news in an Instragram post, which also noted that “Blue Origin’s operations are increasingly shifting to Cape Canaveral.” The Space Coast lies just a few hundred miles from Bezos’ new home in South Florida
Those symptoms imply that Bezos is prioritizing Blue Origin more than in the future and is more actively involved in the company’s business, Parmar said. (Like SpaceX, Blue Origin has ambitious ambitions; Bezos has said he needs humanity to expand its footprint in the sun system. )
“Everything they’ve been doing is going to accelerate,” Parmar said. “He’s doing everything he can on this. “
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Michael Wall is a senior space writer at Space. com and joined the team in 2010. It basically covers exoplanets, spaceflight, and military space, but it’s known for getting into the field of space art. His book on the search for extraterrestrial life, “Out There,” 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 Science Writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest assignment is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
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