SpaceXthe space company that has Elon Musk At the helm, he has had turbulent days and equally promising ones. But today we could affirm that it has positioned itself as the most established and respected company in this young branch of exploration outside our planet.
There was a time when thinking about this signature necessarily represented taking a rugged tour through a lot of failed missions that often did not even make it past the take-off platform but that almost always ended in a resounding explosion.
But those days are relatively in the past (if we ignore the current risk with their Starlink satellites). Elon Musk and the folks at SpaceX seem to have finally mastered the art of launching their reusable rockets Falcon 9achieving a successive series of successful missions in a row without incident.
For now, the biggest current challenge is to get out of this bad streak of failures, fires and explosions with its enormous Starship rocket, designed with the intention and objective of being able to take a crew of astronauts to the red planet of Mars in the not-so-distant future. .
There are several complications in this area, but the dream remains. All at the same time that they have expressed their objectives for next year 2024 and they are quite ambitious.
SpaceX and Elon Musk want to increase their pace to 144 missions by 2024
According to an article by Yahoo! NewsSpaceX and Elon Musk are looking to take things much further this year 2024 by substantially increasing their annual rocket launch record.
The company launched a total of 74 orbital missions as of October 2023. In 2022, during all 12 months, they achieved a total of 61 launches and for next year the goal is to crush the already surpassed mark by a greater margin:
“This year, we are going to try to make 100 flights. Looking ahead, we want to increase that flight rate to about 12 flights per month, or 144 flights.”
These are the words of Bill Gerstenmaier, vice president of construction and flight reliability at SpaceX, during the hearing before the Subcommittee on Space and Science of the United States Senate that took place on October 18.
It is therefore a high-minded goal that would require some important changes in the company’s current work rhythm, since they should go from averaging one launch every 3.9 days to one every 2.8 days.
But taking into consideration the antecedents it is practically a fact that they would achieve it.