SpaceX has now landed more boosters than most other rockets ever launched

SpaceX launches have become extremely routine. On Tuesday night, SpaceX launched its 42nd rocket of the year, sending another set of Starlink satellites into orbit. Chances are, you didn’t even notice.

Still, the cumulative numbers are mind-boggling. SpaceX is launching a mission every 2.7 days this year. Consider that from the mid-1980s to the 2010s, the total number of launches recorded worldwide in any given year was 129.

But in Tuesday night’s assignment, one number in particular stood out: 300.

Recover a large number of rockets

That is a lot of Booster landings, importantly, they all occurred in less than a decade. SpaceX did not successfully land its first Falcon 9 booster until the rocket’s 20th overall flight. This is what happened on the ORBCOMM-2 mission on December 22, 2015, when the first stage booster returned to the launch pad near the launch site. More than four months later, the first drone landed.

Well, over the lifetime of the fleet, SpaceX has successfully landed about 85% of the Falcon rockets it has launched. Today, more than 90% of missions are launched on previously flown boosters. So rocket recovery is exactly the same thing.

There are several other ways to look at the significance of the number 300.

Landing 300 rockets means SpaceX retains 2,700 Merlin rocket engines. In round numbers, the dry mass of the Falcon 9 first stage is about 50 tons, so the landing of all these rockets prevented 15,000 tons of metal and other materials from being dumped into the ocean, which is equivalent to about 100 tons of metal and other materials. .

There are only a handful of rockets with more than 300 launches, and they are all made in Russia. Soyuz has launched several different variants over the years, with Soyuz-U being the all-time leader with 786 launches, followed by the Cosmos-3M booster (445 launches) and the Proton-K booster ( 211 launches).

Among active rockets, there is indeed no competitor after Falcon 9. .

Falcon 9 forever?

A fun parlor game is speculating on whether the Falcon 9 rocket has a chance of supplanting the Soyuz booster as the most flown rocket of all time. Since its debut in 1966, all Soyuz rocket variants have been launched more than 1,700 times. Nearly sixty years later, it’s still going on, with Soyuz likely to continue flying a dozen missions a year for much of the rest of this decade, if not longer. Although the Russian space program has repeatedly talked about replacing the Soyuz with an updated family of rockets, such boosters remain firmly on the drawing board.

As for the Falcon 9 rocket, its booster has been launched nearly 350 times so far. At this rate, it is expected to overtake the Soyuz by the mid-2030s.

Of course, the Falcon 9 rocket won’t continue at this pace. Sometime in the next year or two, SpaceX’s larger Starship rocket will begin launching Starlink satellites. That would eliminate some of the need for the Falcon 9, although smaller boosters will likely continue flying for the foreseeable future, at least into the 2030s.