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Also remember the famous SpaceX skeptic memo “then we’ll talk”?
The repeated flights of Falcon 9 rockets into space will not surprise anyone today, but last weekend the main “workhorse” of SpaceX was marked by a significant and very historical achievement: the F9 B5 stage with the index B1062 completed 20 successful “start” cycles – landing”.
The event itself occurred on April 13, 2024 during the Starlink Group 6-49 mission to launch a new batch of 23 Starlink Internet satellites into orbit. The Falcon 9 rocket launched from the SLC-40 launch site at Cape Canaveral at 01:40 UTC (18:40 Kyiv time). According to the already proven scheme, in two and a half minutes the first stage separated, and in the ninth minute it landed on the autonomous offshore platform A Shortfall of Gravitas in the Atlantic Ocean.
Falcon 9 lands on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship – completing the first 20th launch and landing of a booster! pic.twitter.com/G0w4IlXzNP
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) April 13, 2024
The absolute record holder made its first flight on November 5, 2020 – in almost three and a half years, the booster helped put into orbit two manned Crew Dragon spacecraft (Inspiration4 and Axiom-1 missions), two GPS devices, telecommunications satellites (Nilesat -301, ArabSat 7B), 17 OneWeb Internet satellites and 507 Starlink own Internet satellites.
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Since November 2020, SpaceX has reused the B1062 stage for 20 launches
It is interesting that along with this record, SpaceX received another one – it carried out two launches from the SLC-40 launch complex with an interval of less than three days. The previous one took place on April 10 at 05:40 UTC, and the next one took place on April 13 at 01:40 UTC – the interval between launches was 2 days 19 hours 40 minutes (that is, less than 68 hours). Engineers were able to improve the previous record by about 26 hours.
One of the key differences between SpaceX rockets is reusability for significant cost savings on delivering cargo into space. Falcon family rockets reuse the first stage and main fairing. After launch, the first stage, using a propulsion system, lands on a spaceport or offshore platform (depending on the mission profile and remaining fuel), and after recovery it re-serves new launches. A little history: On March 31, 2017, SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 for the first time with a restored first stage, and in 2018 switched to the Falcon 9 Block 5 generation of rocket with additional optimizations for repeated use (10 times with minimal inter-flight maintenance and up to 100 times with partial replacement of parts). Since then, SpaceX has been confidently updating its records for repeated use of launch vehicles – over the entire period, Falcon family rockets have successfully completed 297 landings out of 308 attempts. A total of 42 launch vehicles flew several times. SpaceX has also reused fairing halves more than 300 times, some of which have flown more than eleven missions.
Now SpaceX is actively preparing for the fourth test flight of Starship, which is expected in a month – in May. Previously, President Gwyn Shotwell called the third test “extremely successful” and specified a goal for 2024 to successfully launch Starlink into orbit using Starship, return both parts and carry out 148 Falcon 9 launches.
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