SpaceX had a reasonably good 2024.
Elon Musk’s firm broke its personal document for many launches in a single yr, continued pushing the boundaries of rocket reuse and made severe strides towards getting Starship, its next-generation megarocket, up and operating.
Oh, and Musk has apparently entered the inside circle of President-elect Donald Trump, wielding political energy like he by no means has earlier than. Here’s a quick rundown of SpaceX’s very busy yr.
Shattering launch data 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 yr. The firm’s orbital tally in 2024, as of Dec. 23, is 131 — greater than half the worldwide complete for the yr.
Related: 8 ways in which SpaceX has remodeled spaceflight
The overwhelming majority of the SpaceX liftoffs this yr — 128 of them — had been carried out by its workhorse Falcon 9, with the highly effective Falcon Heavy chargeable for the opposite two.
And Starship launched 4 instances as effectively, on suborbital check flights that lifted off in March, June, October and November of this yr. The car made severe progress on these trial launches. On the latest three, as an example, each Starship components — the Super Heavy first-stage booster and Ship higher stage — survived reentry to Earth’s ambiance and made all of it the way in which to the planet’s floor.
And on Flight 5, which lifted off on Oct. 13, Super 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.
This is the Starship plan over the lengthy haul, by the way in which: SpaceX desires to catch each Super Heavy and Ship again on the launch tower, a technique that may make inspection and reflight of the megarocket faster and extra environment friendly.
The Starship progress this yr is necessary, as a result of SpaceX and NASA have a comparatively tight timeline for the rocket: It’s 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 firm 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.
Speaking of reuse, SpaceX set a brand new Falcon 9 document this yr: On Dec. 4, the corporate launched a mission that marked the twenty fourth flight for that exact rocket’s first stage. (The Falcon 9 will not be totally reusable; its higher stage is expendable.) That will not be the tip of it, nonetheless; if historical past is any information, SpaceX will possible maintain pushing that document ahead, to 25 flights and past.
A giant Starlink milestone
Four of this yr’s Falcon 9 missions despatched astronauts to orbit — together with Polaris Dawn in September, which went farther from Earth than any crewed flight for the reason that Apollo period and carried out the first-ever non-public spacewalk.
But 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. But 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 first Starlink satellite tv for pc direct-to-cell telephone constellation is now full,” the billionaire entrepreneur mentioned through X, the social media platform that he owns, on Dec. 5. “This will allow unmodified cellphones to have web connectivity in distant areas. Bandwidth per beam is simply ~10Mb, however future constellations shall be far 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 an excessive amount of time on X — to assist Trump’s profitable presidential run.
The two 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 could not essentially change something. SpaceX was already a robust and necessary participant in authorities circles, in spite of everything; it is the highest U.S. launch supplier and routinely lofts key national-security satellites.
But having larger entry to the halls of energy definitely will not damage Musk’s numerous corporations, SpaceX included; the scenario poses conflict-of-interest issues, as a variety of folks have identified. And it is one other a part of SpaceX’s very eventful, and really achieved, 2024.
