SpaceX flight rate continues to climb

If SpaceX achieves VP of Flight Kiko Dontchev’s recently established goal of another 26 launches by the end of the year, the company will not only notch a new record, but set the stage for an even higher flight rate in 2025.

SpaceX eclipsed last year’s total of 98 launches in October and is now targeting (for the next seven weeks) an average launch rate of once every two days – twice the pace of 2023, and faster than the company moved at the beginning of 2024.

This year’s record-setting pace included three pauses for anomalies – events that historically grounded vehicles for months, but in SpaceX’s case, an abundance of flight data reduced to days or weeks.

Even with Starship on the horizon, 2025 will be another year dominated by Falcon 9 flights. Musk indicated in his June talk with Tim Dodd that SpaceX was making "almost 200 upper stages of Falcon” this year, and that next year will be “probably over 200.”

SpaceX needs the higher flight rate now because it is effectively deploying two of its own constellations at once – the classic broadband Starlink, and the new direct-to-device Starlink – both of which need thousands of satellites.

Plus, SpaceX is launching at least two constellations for the U.S. military – the SpaceX-built Starshield spy satellite network and the Space Development Agency’s PWSA missile-warning constellation. These sources of internal and government demand are offsetting the rapid decline in GEO satellite launch, which has become a rarity in the constellation age.

SOURCE: https://x.com/TurkeyBeaver/status/1856104249261752783