Elon Musk's SpaceX on Friday broke its record for the number of rockets launched in a calendar year, topping last year's slate of 31 missions amid a whirlwind campaign to launch its own internet satellites into orbit.
SpaceX's 32nd launch of 2022 using its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket comes as the company races to build a constellation of broadband satellites called Starlink, a largely consumer-based service with hundreds of thousands of internet users.
"Congrats to SpaceX team on record number of launches!" Musk, SpaceX's chief executive, tweeted after the mission, which deployed 46 Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit.
The mission took off from the company's California launchsite at the Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX so far has launched nearly 3,000 Starlink satellites to space.
Friday's mission keeps SpaceX on pace to reach its goal of 52 orbital missions by year's end, nearly doubling its annual launch cadence with the reusable Falcon 9 that SpaceX says can be reflown up to 15 times.
A majority of those missions have been, and are scheduled to be in-house Starlink missions.
The company, founded by Musk in 2002 to normalise interplanetary travel, has in recent months shifted its focus from manufacturing Falcon 9 rockets to managing a fleet of those already built, investing heavily in infrastructure for refurbishing boosters under speedy timelines.
The company has applied the same strategy to its fleet of reusable Crew Dragons - gumdrop-shaped spacecraft that launch atop the Falcon 9 and ferry humans to orbit and the International Space Station.
SpaceX has launched Starlink satellites to space quicker than its rivals in the satellite internet race, such as satellite operator OneWeb, due in part to Falcon 9's rapid reusability and the edge associated with using in-house rockets.
OneWeb, which is nearing completion of an internet constellation with fewer satellites, has launched its satellites on Russia's Soyuz rocket. The company this year plans to use the Falcon 9 after canceling its Soyuz contract over Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Starlink is a satellite internet constellation operated by SpaceX, providing satellite Internet access coverage to 35 countries. It aims for global coverage. SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites in 2019. As of July 2022, Starlink consists of over 2,600 mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO), which communicate with designated ground transceivers. Starlink provides internet access to over 400,000 subscribers as of May 2022.
The SpaceX satellite development facility in Redmond, Washington houses the Starlink research, development, manufacturing, and orbit control teams. The cost of the decade-long project to design, build, and deploy the constellation was estimated by SpaceX in May 2018 to be at least US$10 billion. In February 2017, documents indicated that SpaceX expects more than $30 billion in revenue by 2025 from its satellite constellation, while revenues from its launch business were expected to reach $5 billion in the same year.
On 15 October 2019, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) submitted filings to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) on SpaceX's behalf to arrange spectrum for 30,000 additional Starlink satellites to supplement the 12,000 Starlink satellites already approved by the FCC.
Astronomers have raised concerns about the constellations' effect on ground-based astronomy and how the satellites will add to an already congested orbital environment. SpaceX has attempted to mitigate astronomy concerns by implementing several upgrades to Starlink satellites aimed at reducing their brightness during operation.
The satellites are equipped with krypton-fueled Hall thrusters which allow them to de-orbit at the end of their life. Additionally, the satellites are designed to autonomously avoid collisions based on uplinked tracking data.
You must be logged in to post a comment.