Elon Musk‘s rocket manufacturing company SpaceX has launched its 90th mission for the year, the company said on Tuesday, with more than a third of its aimed launches for the year yet to take off.
What Happened: “Falcon 9 launches our 90th mission of the year,” SpaceX wrote on social media platform X, formerly Twitter, after a Falcon 9 rocket launched the European Commission's Galileo L13 mission to medium Earth orbit from Florida.
The Falcon 9 rocket on Tuesday launched two new Galileo satellites into space. Galileo is the European Union’s (EU) Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) which provides improved navigation, positioning, and timing information. The European Commission manages and oversees the implementation of all activities under the program on behalf of the EU.
About The Mission: SpaceX believes in reusing parts of its launch vehicles. Reuse, the company says, will rapidly bring down the cost of spaceflight as most cost is incurred on building launch vehicles.
On Tuesday, the Falcon 9 first-stage booster which supported the L13 mission successfully landed on a drone ship in the Atlantic Ocean unlike in the Galileo L12 mission earlier his year. The booster was expended or not recovered in the Galileo L12 mission so as to provide the additional performance needed to deliver the payload to orbit.
However, SpaceX used data from the older mission to make design and operational changes to recover and reuse the booster on Tuesday.
Why It Matters: 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 and Starlink missions accounting for a major chunk of it.
SpaceX is looking to launch 144 times through the end of the year, averaging twelve times per month.
For the entirety of 2023, SpaceX only completed 96 launches, not including two test flights of the company’s Starship launch vehicle.
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Photo courtesy: SpaceX
