SpaceX’s space achievements in 2024

SpaceX has a hugely successful 2024. Elon Musk’s company broke its own record for most launches in a year, continued to push the boundaries of rocket reuse and made great strides toward launching Starship, the world’s super rocket system. New system, put into operation, according to Space.

SpaceX launched 98 missions into orbit in 2023, setting a new record at that time. But the company’s total number of orbital launches in 2024, as of December 23, has jumped to 131, more than half the number globally. The majority of SpaceX’s launches this year (128) were carried out by the Falcon 9 transport rocket while the Falcon Heavy rocket was responsible for two other launches.

The Starship system alone has launched four times in suborbital flights in March, June, October and November this year. The vehicle made important progress during these test launches. For example, in the last three launches, both Starship components, the Super Heavy booster on the first stage and the Ship on the upper stage, passed through the reentry process and landed on the planet’s surface. On the 5th flight (Flight 5) taking off on October 13, Super Heavy returned safely to the launch tower, being caught by the “chopsticks” arm on the tower like in a sci-fi movie.

In the long term, SpaceX wants to catch both the Super Heavy rocket and the Ship flying back to the launch tower in a strategy to help check and send the super rocket back to flight more quickly and effectively. Starship’s progress in 2024 is very important because SpaceX and NASA set a relatively urgent timeline for this rocket system. Starship will be the ship carrying astronauts to land on NASA’s Artemis 3 Moon mission, scheduled to depart mid-2027. In addition, SpaceX also wants to use a combination of Starship’s power and complete reusability as a breakthrough that made Mars settlement commercially viable.

In terms of reuse, SpaceX also set a new record with Falcon 9. On December 4, the company launched a mission marking the 24th flight of the first stage of this rocket (Falcon 9 is not a reusable rocket). completely). SpaceX is likely to continue to push that record to 25 or more flights in the future.

Four of this year’s Falcon 9 missions launched astronauts into orbit, including the Polaris Dawn mission in September, which flew farther from Earth than any manned flight since the Apollo era and conducted first private spacewalk. But the majority of Falcon 9’s 2024 launches (nearly 70%) are used to build Starlink, a broadband Internet super-constellation in low Earth orbit. Currently, Starlink includes more than 6,800 satellites. A small portion of those, about 350 satellites, can transmit service directly to smartphones.