Until a few years ago, a Space rocket The middle class seemed like an almost impossible task and probably wasn’t particularly beneficial. Thanks to Elon Musk and a team of engineers who helped him (as well as funding from NASA) the class of Falcon 9 space rockets From SpaceXafter a brief interlude with the smaller and less successful Falcon 1.
The days of funny videos are long gone “How not to land an orbital rocket booster” In doing so, the US company itself has highlighted the mistakes that it has overcome to create a carrier that is versatile, offers good payload capacity and, above all, can be reused in a short time. This has shaken the market and led to several companies emerging and growing Startups in the industry (not all of them will be able to survive) and also highlights the difficulties of historical giants of the industry. With the landing of first stage B1058 we have achieved 18. Takeoff and landing of a Falcon 9a new record ready to be broken (pending Starship, of course).
SpaceX launches and lands a Falcon 9 rocket 18 times
The record of first stage B1058 was achieved in recent days with the launch of 23 Starlink 2nd generation mini-satellites. This first stage was already one of two that achieved 17 takeoffs and landings in recent weeks, and was therefore a given SpaceX continue to use. Previously there was talk of a limit of 20 uses per person Falcon 9but the company could exceed even that limit if recovery work and reliability are not compromised.
In the past, the company offered launches using already-used rockets, gave its customers a discount, and encouraged the launch of Starlink missions so that if the launch had not been successful, the satellites would have been lost SpaceX and not a paying customer. However, for some time now the company has decided to stop reducing the price for using boosters that have already been used, and customers seem to prefer this too Falcon 9 which have already flown to several times booster new.
In the case of B1058The most recent mission took place on November 4, launching at 1:47 a.m. ET from Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. With the landing on the first leg, everything went as planned Drone ship A lack of gravitas (ASOG). SpaceX had previously used this first stage for Crew Demo-2, ANASIS-11, CRS-21, Transporter-1, Transporter-3 and twelve Starlink missions.
Due to his involvement in two missions in ride share (Transporter) is also the carrier that has launched more satellites into orbit (nearly 850) than the current Falcon 9 fleet and is also one of the oldest units in active service (having debuted in May 2020). They were also engaged in the same mission disguise one of the two halves has already been used in 13 other missions. With the arrival of Starship, there will be coexistence between Falcon 9/Heavy and the new carrier for a certain period of time (a few years), while in the future the entire fleet will consist of the new, fully reusable space rocket, as should be the case have a higher cadence and significantly higher resilience.
