As SpaceX closes a year of halcyon, today marks the fifth anniversary of the first Falcon Booster landing and the company is celebrating a series of record successes.
SpaceX completed its last launch and landing on December 19, delivering a mysterious US spy satellite into Earth orbit (LEO), while the Falcon 9 B1059 amplifier returned to Landing Zone 1 (LZ-1) for the fifth successful recovery in 12 months. Known as the NROL-108, the mission was the 26th SpaceX of the year, breaking its previous record of 21 launches by almost 25%.
In addition to making Falcon 9 the world’s most launched rocket of 2020 and demonstrating in a full quarter that an annual cadence of over 40 launches is well within reach of SpaceX, NROL-108 also marked a milestone impressive booster landing almost five years until the day after the first success.
Starting with the NROL-108, SpaceX landed 20 consecutive Falcon boosters without fail, setting a previous record of 19. Incredibly, the company set this record in 2020, despite the fact that the last Falcon Booster landing failure took place in March. from this year. In other words, SpaceX has successfully achieved 20 boosters in a row in the eight months since then.
After a flawless year of landings in 2017, SpaceX has suffered one or more failed booster landings each year – including two in 2020. As SpaceX continues to demonstrate that Falcon amplifiers are indeed capable of meeting its design goal. at least 10 launches each, failed landings (and therefore loss of stimulators) are an increasingly undesirable result. With any luck, 20 back-to-back landings suggest that SpaceX has found its way and hopefully canceled out most of the technical and organizational issues that have allowed multiple failures in recent years.
Starting with the NROL-108, the SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy amps have completed 70 successful landings (out of 80 attempts) in the last five years. In other words, of the Falcon family’s 105 successful launches, nearly two-thirds (67) included one or more successful booster landings.
Finally, SpaceX is just getting started and CEO Elon Musk recently unveiled a target of 48 launches in 2021 – almost doubling its record pace in 2020. With Falcon launching an endangered species , it is safe to say that there will be a lot more booster landings next year.
