SpaceX Caps '22 With Record-Setting 61st Falcon 9 Launch (cbsnews.com) 24
Closing out a record-setting year, SpaceX launched a $186 million Israeli Earth-imaging satellite early Friday, the California rocket builder's 61st and final Falcon 9 launch of 2022 and its seventh this month, both modern-day records. From a report: Since the rocket's debut in 2010, SpaceX has chalked up 194 Falcon 9 launches overall -- 198 including four triple-core Falcon Heavies -- putting together a string of 179 straight successful flights since the company's only in-flight failure in 2015. This year's flight total falls one short of doubling last year's. Even more flights are expected in 2023, including two NASA astronaut ferry flights to the International Space Station, at least two commercial crew flights, two station cargo flights, and the maiden orbital launch of SpaceX's huge Super Heavy/Starship rocket.
I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
But for myself, I'm not there yet: this shit never seems to get old to me. The twin booster landings [youtu.be] of a Falcon Heavy are particularly awesome.
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Do you recall when the Space Shuttle was supposed to achieve a 52-a-year launch schedule? I remember that. Some airlines don't fly that often.
SpaceX has managed to more than triple that. So I would say it is pretty routine now.
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Why? Spanish has been spoken longer in many US states than English has.
Re:And how many of those were Starlink? (Score:4, Insightful)
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From an operational point of view it doesn't matter and a launch is a launch. So it's cool they could turn around 60 launches.
The point is that the business feasibility of everything depends on attracting customers and charging them enough to sustain operations. Think if Ford claimed to make 2x as many cars in 2023 by selling them to their own subsidiary at unknown prices.
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Think if Ford claimed to make 2x as many cars in 2023 by selling them to their own subsidiary at unknown prices.
As long as they actually made that many working cars it's still impressive. And we know that SpaceX did actually make all those successful launches, not least because we can watch them go up and also use the Starlink service that relies on the payloads. There are enough numbers out on Starlink subscriptions worldwide to know that it's not an accounting trick to keep SpaceX flying.
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Starlink appears to be a viable business, or this argument would be valid.
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Starlink appears to be a viable business, or this argument would be valid.
Well that's highly questionable.
They have to launch 12,000 satellites on the low end and up to 42,000. That's 200 to 700 launches just to get the constellation. Then they'll need to replace the satellites every five years so that's 40 to 200 launches indefinitely
They claim the TAM is a trillion [satellitetoday.com]. That might be the total broadband but they aren't getting anywhere near that. Most people in developing countries live in urban area with at least decent cable, fiber or wireless coverage. My cable modem was free an
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rsilvergun said it wouldn't be in good taste to possibly comment since FTX (the largest Ponzi scheme) was found to be funneling money to the Democrat Party.
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It takes experience to get better at something. Rocketry is no exception. It costs money to develop/build/launch rockets. SpaceX found a way to have a guaranteed customer for the rockets they needed to build and launch. They became their own customer.
SpaceX started the Starlink service to give themselves a reason to launch enough rockets per year to maintain the development cadence needed to make reliable, bigger, reusable rockets practical. The Starlink service is in demand and profitable enough to cov
160th successful first stage retrieval (Score:4, Informative)
And it's not slowing down [nextspaceflight.com]
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Re:no one cares... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worth pointing out that a lot of the success of SpaceX should be credited to Gwynne Shotwell, who is the president and chief operating officer.
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Yep, yet another successful white man.
Suck it up.
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Uh, the world's top rocket engineers would have gone to Blue Origin instead and they'd be the ones with this. Musk was just following the Blue Origin business plan, he even got sued by Blue Origin for stealing the ocean booster landing idea, which Blue Origin had patented. These reusable rockets are continuations of programs like SLI and DC-X that NASA canceled in the early 2000s. A lot of SLI and DC-X engineers went to work for Blue Origin and SpaceX. The Falcon 9's Merlin engines were designed by Tom Muel
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he even got sued by Blue Origin for stealing the ocean booster landing idea, which Blue Origin had patented.
Not here to defend Musk, but you left out the part that Blue Origin lost that suit and their patent was cancelled. Six and a half years ago.
And Blue Origin still hasn't made use of that patent, thirteen years after they filed it.
We've got an apt descriptor to use for entities who engage in such behavior: patent troll.