SpaceX Hits New Milestone In 2024 With 134 Launches

Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX has completed 134 launches in 2024, setting a new milestone.

What Happened: For the entirety of 2023, SpaceX only completed 96 launches, not including two test flights of the company's Starship launch vehicle.

SpaceX was initially looking to complete 144 launches this year or an average of 12 times per month.

However, SpaceX VP of Launch Kiko Dontchev said in November that the company will not make its goal of 144 launches this year but is still targeting 30 more launches, or one launch every two days, for the rest of the year.

As of the end of 2024, the company has completed 134 launches, excluding four Starship test flights. A majority of the launches were conducted by the company’s Falcon 9 launch vehicle and merely two on the company’s Falcon Heavy launch vehicle, one in the first half of the year and one in the second.

SpaceX’s first launch this year was on Jan. 2. Falcon 9 then launched 21 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.

The company has launched every month since, with the most launches completed in November and the least in July, owing to a two-week pause in operations mid-month. The last launch of the year was conducted on Tuesday when the company’s Falcon 9 launched 21 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit from Florida.

The company also completed four test flights of its ambitious Starship launch vehicle this year – in March, June, October, and the latest in November.

Landmark Missions:

In September, SpaceX launched the Polaris Dawn mission to space. The five-day Polaris Dawn mission included a spacewalk carried out by private astronauts including billionaire and Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.

While space agency NASA routinely conducts extravehicular activities with government astronauts, no commercial player or civilians attempted it before, making Polaris a landmark mission for SpaceX and commercial spaceflight companies.

Yet another significant achievement for the company this year was when it caught the Starship launch vehicle’s booster back at Starbase with the metal arms of the launch tower, in a demonstration of the vehicle’s reusability, during its third flight test in October.

Accidents And Operational Pauses:

The year, however, was not without accidents.

SpaceX launched its Falcon 9 rocket with 20 Starlink satellites from California on July 11. However, the Starlink satellites were deployed in a lower-than-intended orbit owing to an issue with the rocket’s second-stage engine. The Starlink satellites were demised and the company's launch operations were subsequently placed on hold until July 27.

In late August, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded the Falcon after a rocket booster that supported a Starlink mission failed to land upright on a droneship at sea and exploded upon returning to Earth. However, the FAA gave the green light for the company to resume launch operations two days later.

Earlier this month, Reuters also reported that SpaceX lost ground control for at least an hour during the Polaris Dawn mission in September. The SpaceX mission control was unable to command its Dragon spacecraft in orbit during the outage but the vehicle remained safe and maintained some communication with the ground with the help of the company's Starlink satellite network, the report said.

Reuters could not determine the exact time and duration of the outage. However, as per two of the agency's sources, it happened before the planned spacewalk and lasted at least an hour. 

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