SpaceX launch Wednesday marks record 24th flight of booster

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel on Dec 4, 2024

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SpaceX set a new standard for its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket Wednesday using a first-stage booster for a record 24th time.

The rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 at 5:13 a.m. Eastern time carrying another 24 Starlink satellites headed for low-Earth orbit.

The booster became the first in the SpaceX fleet to hit 24 launches, and it made a successful recovery landing downrange in the Atlantic on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas.

It marked the 86th rocket launch from the Space Coast in 2024, with all but five coming from SpaceX.

The record-setting booster first flew June 3, 2021 on the CRS-22 cargo Dragon resupply mission to the International Space Station. It notably flew both the Crew-3 and Crew-4 human spaceflight missions to the ISS as well.

The boosters for the first four SpaceX human spaceflight missions have all been destroyed. The booster used for the historic first trip with crew on board — the Demo-2 flight in 2020 that was also the lone booster with a NASA logo on it — made 19 flights, but toppled over on the droneship during rough seas with most of the hardware falling into the ocean.

The booster SpaceX used for both Crew-1 and Crew-2, which also debuted in 2020, made 23 flights before its final mission to send the European Space Agency’s Hera probe to a distant asteroid. That October launch this year required a full burn from the booster leaving no fuel for a recovery attempt, so it was lost in the Atlantic.

Also lost was the booster used for both the Inspiration4 mission with billionaire Jared Isaacman that flew in 2021 followed by 2022’s first Axiom Space commercial mission to the space station. That booster flew 23 times, but blew up on its final landing attempt this past August.

SpaceX has three other active boosters with at least 20 launches, which were originally designed for just 10 reflights each.

In April this year, the company announced it was working toward qualifying boosters for 40 missions.

“Increasing Falcon’s flight count provides valuable information on repeated reuse, a critical element for making life multiplanetary with Starship,” the company posted on X.

To date, the company has recovered its boosters 378 times since the first successful landing in 2015. It has now reflown boosters 349 times.

Wednesday’s mission was the 120th Falcon 9 flight of 2024 from among SpaceX’s three pads in Florida and California, on top of two Falcon Heavy launches from KSC this year. The company has also flown its in-development Starship and Super Heavy on four missions from its Texas launch site.

The company has another Falcon 9 flight for Starlink planned from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base late Wednesday night, then another Space Coast launch lined up for late Thursday morning from Kennedy Space Center.

The Sirius XM-9 mission is targeting liftoff from KSC’s Launch Pad 39-A during a window from 11:10 a.m. to 12:40 p.m. with a backup on Friday from 11:10 a.m. to 1:08 p.m.

Space Launch Delta 45’s weather squadron forecasts better than 95% chance for good conditions Thursday, which drops to 75% if delayed until Friday.

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