SpaceX had a fairly good 2024.
Elon Musk’s firm broke its personal document for many launches in a single 12 months, continued pushing the boundaries of rocket reuse and made critical strides towards getting Starship, its next-generation megarocket, up and operating.
Oh, and Musk has apparently entered the internal circle of President-elect Donald Trump, wielding political energy like he by no means has earlier than. Here is a quick rundown of SpaceX’s very busy 12 months.
Shattering launch information and Starship flights
SpaceX launched 98 orbital missions in 2023, a brand new document for the corporate on the time — however it left that mark within the mud this 12 months. The corporate’s orbital tally in 2024, as of Dec. 23, is 131 — greater than half the worldwide complete for the 12 months.
Associated: 8 ways in which SpaceX has remodeled spaceflight
The overwhelming majority of the SpaceX liftoffs this 12 months — 128 of them — had been carried out by its workhorse Falcon 9, with the highly effective Falcon Heavy answerable for the opposite two.
And Starship launched 4 instances as properly, on suborbital take a look at flights that lifted off in March, June, October and November of this 12 months. The automobile made critical progress on these trial launches. On the newest three, as an illustration, each Starship parts — the Tremendous Heavy first-stage booster and Ship higher stage — survived reentry to Earth’s environment and made all of it the way in which to the planet’s floor.
And on Flight 5, which lifted off on Oct. 13, Tremendous Heavy got here again safely to its launch tower, which grabbed the booster with its “chopstick” arms in a transfer that appeared like a scene from science fiction.
That is the Starship plan over the lengthy haul, by the way in which: SpaceX desires to catch each Tremendous Heavy and Ship again on the launch tower, a method that may make inspection and reflight of the megarocket faster and extra environment friendly.
The Starship progress this 12 months is essential, as a result of SpaceX and NASA have a comparatively tight timeline for the rocket: It is the crewed lander for the company’s Artemis 3 moon mission, which is at the moment scheduled to elevate off in mid-2027.
And SpaceX has large plans for the megarocket past that effort. The corporate sees Starship’s mixture of energy and full reusability because the breakthrough that may make the settlement of Mars — a long-held dream of Musk’s — economically viable.
Talking of reuse, SpaceX set a brand new Falcon 9 document this 12 months: On Dec. 4, the corporate launched a mission that marked the twenty fourth flight for that specific rocket’s first stage. (The Falcon 9 is just not totally reusable; its higher stage is expendable.) That will not be the top of it, nevertheless; if historical past is any information, SpaceX will seemingly maintain pushing that document ahead, to 25 flights and past.
A giant Starlink milestone
4 of this 12 months’s Falcon 9 missions despatched astronauts to orbit — together with Polaris Daybreak in September, which went farther from Earth than any crewed flight because the Apollo period and performed the first-ever personal spacewalk.
However many of the 2024 Falcon 9 launches — almost 70% of them — had been dedicated to constructing out Starlink, SpaceX’s broadband constellation in low Earth orbit, which at the moment consists of greater than 6,800 satellites.
A small subset of this complete — about 350 spacecraft — are able to beaming service on to smartphones. However that quantity is critical, as Musk famous shortly after a key Dec. 4 Starlink launch (not the identical one which set the Falcon 9 reflight document).
“The primary Starlink satellite tv for pc direct-to-cell cellphone constellation is now full,” the billionaire entrepreneur stated through X, the social media platform that he owns, on Dec. 5. “This can allow unmodified cellphones to have web connectivity in distant areas. Bandwidth per beam is simply ~10Mb, however future constellations will likely be rather more succesful.”
Elon Musk and Trump get shut
Musk was an enormous backer of President-elect Donald Trump throughout this election cycle, in the end spending about $250 million — and a substantial amount of time on X — to assist Trump’s profitable presidential run.
The 2 are apparently now fairly shut, and Trump has tapped Musk to co-lead a brand new advisory committee tasked with serving to slash laws and lower authorities spending.
This new relationship might not basically change something. SpaceX was already a robust and essential participant in authorities circles, in any case; it is the highest U.S. launch supplier and routinely lofts key national-security satellites.
However having larger entry to the halls of energy actually will not harm Musk’s numerous firms, SpaceX included; the state of affairs poses conflict-of-interest issues, as plenty of individuals have identified. And it is one other a part of SpaceX’s very eventful, and really achieved, 2024.
