SpaceX launches 60 Starlink Satellites, Lands Booster for Record 10th Time
CAPE CANAVERAL SPACE FORCE STATION, Fla. (SpaceX PR) — On Sunday, May 9 at 2:42 a.m. EDT, Falcon 9 launched 60 Starlink satellites from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. After stage separation, Falcon 9’s first stage returned to Earth and landed on the “Just Read the Instructions” droneship.
This was the first Falcon 9 first stage booster to complete a tenth launch and landing. The first stage booster previously supported Crew Dragon’s first demonstration mission to the International Space Station, the RADARSAT Constellation Mission, SXM-7, and now seven Starlink missions.
Editor’s Note: SpaceX has now launched 1,625 Starlink broadband satellites, with more than 1,550 in orbit.
54 responses to “SpaceX launches 60 Starlink Satellites, Lands Booster for Record 10th Time”
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B1051. Ten trips up, ten trips back. First flight March 2, 2019. Impressive.
Yep, and in only 26 months. Now let’s see when the next one hits the milestone.
StarLink 26 (out of order) goes up May 15 using booster B1058.8
Date _____Gap Months.
Mar ’19 ___New
Jun ’19 ___3
Jan ’20 ___7
Apr ’20 ___3
Aug ’20 ___4
Oct ’20___ 2
Dec ’20___2
Jan ’21___1
Mar ’21___2
May ’21___2
I think we can see a bit of a trend on turn around times.
Note how they’re not getting longer yet.
Also note the impact of the demand for Starlink launches which started in late 2019 on flight rate. It does no good to have a rapid turnaround if there is no demand for the services of a booster.
Going uphill like popcorn, with no slowdown in sight.
As I said in another thread, it would be interesting to know what exactly is original to this booster, and what has been replaced over the years. I’m sure the fan boys will disagree, but if, say, all or most of the engines have been replaced, we are not yet to “airliner-like” reliability. That said, I doubt we will ever know…
Not to “airline like” in terms of today’s mature airline industry, but in the days it was an emerging industry in the 1920’s and 1930’s. The aircraft in that era required a lot more maintenance between flights. So a fairer comparison would be with the airline industry in the days it started climbing the hundred year long learning curve it benefits from.
When Musk said airliner-like reliably, he was not comparing to ’20s and ’30s airliners. He more than once compared the necessary reliability to a 747.
Yeah…like so much that Musk says…that plan is aspirational. But it is those very aspirations that have moved rocket engineering way-way-way beyond what all the experts claimed was possible.
No “experts” ever claimed it was impossible fanboy.
The claim has always been that the worst thing to ever happen to space exploration has been this screaming everything can be done on the cheap and that the space agency and aerospace are all corrupt and only the NewSpace flagship company can do it right.
The truth is- there is no cheap.
VTVL was done in the 90’s and the concept was first seriously proposed by Philip Bono in the EARLY 60’s. The criticism has always been about it breaking even in terms of cost. Though flying that hobby rocket ten times certainly looks like it is paying off, it is not actual proof. If quite a few of those engines have been replaced and adding in all the turn-around costs and down-time adds up to being more than what dropping the stage in the ocean costs, then the critics were right. It was always desirable to reuse as much as was practical and economical and learning how to do it of course makes even getting close to breaking even a valid reason to pursue it. But P.R. and marketing tools used as deceptive leverage is ethically wrong and essentially snake oil. A scam.
Hell of a hobby. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
It was only a fluke your hero watched Rocky Jones space ranger reruns as a child in South Africa. It IS his hobby.
Your permanent state of delusion is impressive.
We need some hobby politicians, hobby doctors, hobby insurance companies, hobby………
You needed to grow up being taught all those things that make a functioning well-adjusted human being but it did not happen.
Finally we get an excuse for your behavior. Are you getting help to get over it or just quit trying?
You troll me, I give it back to you. “We” gives your sick game away fanboy.
LOL!
Says the fanboy member of a cult that worships a narcissist billionaire.
I don’t understand. You keep saying Falcon 9 is a hobby. What makes it a hobby? help me understand.
Nope.
Yes. Explain.
It does appear that his definition of hobby is, that which works. His definition of serious is That which doesn’t, but ought to if enough money is spent.
Then I guess it’s good for you Elon never took this space stuff seriously and really started working at it. Think about all the additional things you’d have to whine about by now if he actually treated all this like a real job.
Yeah. Kinda like that “hobby” car company Mr. Ford started back in the day.
When you call me fanboy…you always make me feel so warm and fuzzy.
That is not really what you are feeling- more like someone peeing down your back and you thinking it is wonderful warm rain.
Funny!
That was your claim, not that of any expert. And, as we see, it is one you are still preposterously making in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. Musk has long since made space launch cheaper and is well along in efforts to make it far cheaper still.
Phil Bono never built or flew any of his big ideas. The backtrail of aerospace is liberally littered with paper design studies and nifty artist concepts of stuff for which no metal was ever bent.
It’s also littered with subscale test articles like DC-X that flew a few tests, got broken and were subsequently abandoned. SpaceX has also flown and broken stuff. Unlike NASA and its legacy contractors, SpaceX pushed past the testing mishaps to achieve operable hardware – first with the Falcons and now with Starship.
But you cling to your antique paper rocket fantasies while heaping vituperation on the person, company and vehicles that are actually opening space to humanity.
Gotta crawl before you are able to run.
He merely compared the 747 for purpose of illustrating hardware reuse. Musk has said over and over and over again that Falcon 9 and FH are evolutional paths to airliner-like reusability.
They examine & bore-scope each engine. If one fails or needs work it’s replaced by either an “experienced” or new engine, then the removed unit goes to the shop.
So long as the Falcons remain in service, I think SpaceX will continue to play those particular cards close to its vest. Once the Falcons are retired, though, we may see at least some cumulative numbers emerge. A book about the service history of the Falcons would be a good project for someone like Eric Berger.
As for “airliner-like reliability,” I can find a number of instances in which Musk has used that phrase anent Starship, but not anent Falcon 9.
impressive
Well, it was a little while coming, but indeed they have done it.
I wonder how Starship’s development will go — surely not as simply and smoothly as Elon draws it up, and probably a bit behind schedule, but it should be amazing. And then, like a reusable upper stage for Falcon and propulsive landing for Dragon, I imagine some aspects of the planned Starship capabilities will be left for a future design that will make Starship obsolete (while others, like catching fairings in nets or crossfeed on the Falcon Heavy will be dropped or simply never implemented)
Musk has said that Starship is as small as they could make it in order to keep development costs down, and that he anticipates larger versions to come. This is the Starship Coupe, small and sporty.
Looks like SpaceX has a Moon mission on tap for the near future…
https://www.bbc.com/news/bu…
Cryptocurrency: Musk’s SpaceX to launch dogecoin moon mission
The reality is that if they had not gone cheap on the shuttle and a few design features had been different then the Space Transportation System would have been far more economical and would still be flying. Even though it was designed in the 70’s it would be superior to this miraculous hobby rocket the fanboys worship at the altar of today. The Air Force and that deal Nixon made with the people in Utah were the main villains.
Someone living out his high school football years, “I would have made the team *if* x, y and z happened. And it would have been amazing!”
Someone harassing someone else with a different view because he thinks he is entitled to be a creep (because he is anonymous and belongs to a cult of far right idiots).
NASA spent $10.6 billion to develop the Space Shuttle. Exactly how much more money do you think NASA should have spent developing the space shuttle?
Cite:
https://www.planetary.org/s…
That is the point…it is not what they spent on the design, it is what they should have designed. You are a pretty dim bulb or you are just trolling me. Or both.
They were cutting the design with cleaver to stay within the $10.6B, there is a relationship between what they designed and how much they spent. They fell back on using Apollo derived OMS/RCS because of budget, for instance.
They did not develop liquid fuel boosters, which would have been more expensive initially than the SRB’s. They wanted the SSME’s to be attached to the Orbiter as a cost cutting measure. And they wasted most of the lift of a Saturn V class vehicle on a 737 size glider that went a couple hundred miles up.
With an engine return module on the bottom of the ET it would have looked much like the SLS except it would have been reusable except for that tank and as already noted, the liquid boosters would have been turned around at the cape instead of disassembled and railed to and from Utah. And the upper stage would have been a 100 tons of anything you wanted to add to the top of that stack.
They went cheap. Just like Skylab would have had more interior space than the ISS but for a few million more dollars. There is no cheap.
“The reality is that if they had not gone cheap on the shuttle and a few design features had been different then the Space Transportation System would have been far more economical and would still be flying.”
“And they wasted most of the lift of a Saturn V class vehicle on a 737 size glider that went a couple hundred miles up.”
Yes Gary, it would have been better if STS had a completely different design, not just a “few design features”. You contradict yourself here. You spend half your life simping for SRBs and in this passage throw them under the bus, pick a horse.
You think anything that does not promote your hero is a contradiction.
When they designed it they had the option of liquid fuel boosters. Several different designs (pressure fed or using available F-1A’s) but they chose the SRB’s due to a backroom deal Nixon had with Utah. The excuse was it would be cheaper up front. Those liquid fuel boosters were essentially the same as the SRB’s, just more efficient, NOT a “completely different design.”
The engine return module (proposed for a cargo version of the Shuttle) would have allowed the SSME’s to be mounted at the bottom of the stack instead of side-mount, which would have allowed different payloads at the top of the stack instead of ONLY the Orbiter. See how that works? You don’t – because your intent is to troll, not discuss.
And of course liquid instead of solid fuel boosters and the crew vehicle on top of the stack instead of the side would have saved both the crews that were lost. But I understand hindsight is better than foresight. We have to learn from mistakes- something the shiny-with-no-escape-system is an example of not doing. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Haha, in other words a major redesign of the stack from what was built, I’m familiar with these notional configurations. None of this moving Lego bricks around was a small configuration change. Let’s face it, some days of the week you wake up a big fan of SRBs, some days not so much. Everyday of the week you wake up you are wrong about the efficacy of propulsive landing a booster. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Cyberstalking again I see. Disgusting.
Five years and about a hundred launches later, still no hard proof that it costs less to reuse than to expend. Conway was right- concerning Human Space Flight LEO is a complete dead end. And the hobby rocket is still sucking up taxpayer dollars from the ISS cash cow. It is a scam. Haha.
Your intent is to troll, not discuss.
Conway was you and you were wrong. https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
There is a severe error in this logic. First, two facts:
1) The Shuttle’s reuse costs are well known, and they were costly.
2) The cost of expending boosters (Atlas, Delta, etc) are also well known.
So, let’s say, hypothetically, that: the costs of reusing a Falcon 9 are so high that they equal the costs of building a brand new Falcon 9. Even if this hypothetical case were to be true, then that would make the Falcon 9 no better than an Atlas or a Delta, but it is also NO worse than the Atlas or Delta. And nothing will ever equal the astronomical reuse costs of the Shuttle.
However: even when a Falcon 9 is launched on fully expendable mode, it is still significantly CHEAPER than launching on an Atlas or Delta. That is reality.
In addition: If —hypothetically— the Falcon 9 reuse costs were extremely high, they will not remain high for long. Why? here’s another fact: in 2020 Falcon 9 alone launched as much mass to space as all other space agencies/companies in the world combined (and this year it will be x3 or x4). That means the launch cadence of the Falcon 9 is creating economies of scale that will inevitably, unavoidably, and undeniably drive the allegedly high reuse costs way down.
Yet, reality and facts demonstrate that the high cost of reusability is not true. And that, my friend, is good news for all.
Conway was right
Mmmm
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
There certainly is no cheap to be found in the government or its legacy contractors. Fortunately, we no longer have to rely on them to get humanity sustainably off our native rock.
The reality is that the politics and institutional incentives of the early- and mid-70s would never have permitted a better design to emerge. Those dysfunctions were even more thoroughly in place by 2010 when SLS was dreamed up by The Swamp.