SpaceX CEO Elon Musk on Monday said that the company will complete a major launch mission every two days in 2025, after delivering close to 90% of Earth’s payload to orbit this year.
What Happened: “SpaceX is doing a major launch every ~3 days now. Next year, a launch every ~2 days,” Musk wrote on X. “We will probably deliver close to 90% of payload mass to Earth orbit and beyond this year.”
If SpaceX launches a mission about every two days as stated by its CEO, the company is looking at about 180 launches in 2025.
Launches In 2024: SpaceX completed 67 missions using its Falcon launch vehicles as of the end of the second quarter, with its Falcon 9 workhorse alone accounting for 66 launches. The company is looking to launch 144 times in 2024, averaging twelve times per month.
However, the company launched only six times throughout July, owing to a two-week pause in operations mid-month due to an issue identified with a Falcon 9 rocket engine during the Starlink mission that launched on July 11.
Increasing Launch Cadence: For the entirety of 2023, SpaceX completed 96 launches, marking a 57% year-on-year increase, not including two Starship test flights. The company’s launch numbers have been steadily increasing, with 26 launches in 2020, 31 in 2021, and 61 in 2022.
What’s Ahead: SpaceX is now gearing up to launch the Polaris Dawn mission from Florida on Tuesday at 3:38 a.m. ET. The mission is the first of up to three human spaceflight missions planned under the Polaris program founded by Shift4 Payments CEO Jared Isaacman.
SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft and the all-civilian Polaris Crew composed of four including its mission commander Isaacman, Kidd Poteet, Sarah Gillis, and Anna Menon will spend up to five days in orbit. While Isaacman and Poteet work together at Shift4, Gillis and Menon are both SpaceX engineers.
The key objective of the mission is to conduct a spacewalk nearly 435 miles above the Earth — marking the first-ever spacewalk by a commercial company — with the help of a SpaceX-designed extravehicular activity spacesuit. While space agency NASA routinely conducts extravehicular activities, no private player has attempted it before, making this a landmark mission for SpaceX and commercial spaceflight companies.
“Crew safety is absolutely paramount and this mission carries more risk than usual, as it will be the furthest humans have traveled from Earth since Apollo and the first commercial spacewalk! If any concerns arise, the launch will be postponed until those concerns are addressed,” Musk said on Monday, hinting at the possibility of postponing the mission.
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