Mass Value Report for January 2024
In the first month of 2024, there have been some setbacks for Falcon 9 - is it time to worry yet?
SpaceX has a target of 144 launches for this year, but in January there have been a number of launch scrubs which no doubt impact cadence. At the target rate, they need an average of 12 flights per month. If they don’t hit this in January, is 144 flights likely to happen?
At some point there will be an upper limit of how many flights per year Falcon 9 can fly, and perhaps we are seeing the first indications of the approach of that limit
The Falcon Model
First, we shall compare this January’s cadence to that of previous years. SpaceX launched 10 Falcon 9 boosters in this month, compared to 7 in January 2023. By looking at the ratio between total flights and flights in January going back to 2017, the first year where there were more than 12 flights and so the expected number of flights in January was greater than 1, we can get an estimate of how many flights to expect this year.
The predicted cadence is 128, falling short of the target. This would still be an impressive annual growth rate of 33%, but behind that which has been seen over the past few years.
There were two missions this month that suffered substantial delays. Both were Starlink missions launched from SLC-4E and Vandenberg Space Force Base, one being delayed from the 9th to the 14th and the other being delayed from the 18th to the 24th, both for weather reasons.
Is January an unusual month for SpaceX? Perhaps, but not obviously so given that these years have seen a rapid increase in cadence in general. Note the there are the exact same number of launches in December 2022 and in January 2023. The rise across each year would be taken into account by the ratio of January launches to total yearly launches.
Had there been 11 flights in January instead of 10, the central prediction for the year would have been 141 - close to the SpaceX target. Given that the first Falcon 9 launch of February will launch from SLC-4E at Vandenberg as well, it might be that the weather scrubs pushed this one into February - Next Spaceflight had this launch as NET January back in December. Weather being worse in January in the northern hemisphere is no huge shock, but perhaps as cadence increases in general weather delays will have more impact on the schedule.
The Top of the Curve
Previously, I have estimated that the top of the Falcon 9 S-Curve will be 200 flights per year, by multiplying manufacture rate by maximum reuse. Recently, Elon Musk suggested a reuse count being bumped from 20 up to 40, which throws the calculation off. I doubt this will mean the top of the curve is 400 flights per year - more likely the Falcon first stage production line will shut down as high levels of reuse become possible. To date, however, no booster has reached 20 flights - B1058 had a recovery accident after its 19th flight and B1061 and B1062 are the new life leaders with 18 flights each.
A recent article quoted a SpaceX manager as saying there could be 100 flights a year from VSFB by 2025 - taking this at face value, it would suggest 300 flights per year across the Falcon fleet given that KSC has two launchpads. Having this happen by 2025 seems a stretch though, and would require a substantial acceleration over the course of 2024 even above the ambitious goal Musk has publicly set.
Simple fitting of the current data, the 2024 projection above, and a top out of 300 flights gives the following curve
Which would not see 300 flights/year until the 2030s. That seems overly pessimistic - and puts far too much weight on the cadence of one month. But it does indicate that SpaceX will have to pick up the pace to get close to their ambitious targets for Falcon 9 - or else abandon those targets in favour of using Starship when it is ready.
Next Month
I’ll be further developing this model next month - with a more data for 2024 the prediction for the rest of the year and beyond can be refined.
There will hopefully be even more missions to talk about - Starship IFT-3 and Intuitive machines IM-1 lunar lander will have both launched.
In other news, I have started a petition for the UK government to try and attract commercial heavy lift launchers (Starship, basically) to the country. If you live here, you can sign it here - and please share it as far as you can.
What I dont know and would be a big factor here is the completion of Starlink (or at least, the launch of all the MIni-v2 satellites, because real V2 satellites cant be launched by Falcon 9. ) Once that happens, (or Starship starts launching V2s, whichever happens first) i'd expect the launch rate to slow because the rest of the market needs to catch up to SpaceX's internal demand...
To a certain degree if you are capped by how many times you can take off the pad at all(infrastructure and weather), it pays to be launching tens or hundreds of tons(starship) instead of a couple of tons(f9 - not that a couple of tons is anything to scoff at).