SpaceX increases 2024 goal to 148 launches

Going into 2024 SpaceX was aiming to launch 144 Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches before the year is up, however, that number has now increased up to 148. The company’s VP of Falcon launch confirmed this at Everyday Astronaut’s AstroAwards.

SpaceX moves four launches into the new year

With us already a month into the new year and we are expecting another record breaking year of launches. The company came up just shy of triple digits in 2023 but we expect them to blow past that limit by the fall.

Jon Edwards, VP of Falcon Launch at SpaceX, made quite a few appearances on behalf of the company at the AstroAwards. While the awards aren’t focused on declaring who the “best launcher” or “best satellite manufacturer” are, it recognizes the companies and agencies that pulled off inspirational and exciting missions in the previous year.

SpaceX played a big role in many of those missions successes as they were the launch provider for many of them. Also we can’t forget Starship, which brought home the “Most Inspiring Mission” award.

However, in a panel discussion at the end of the awards, Edwards made a short comment that moved the goal mark for Falcon’s end of year quota. According to Edwards SpaceX will now be aiming for 148 rocket launches by the end of 2024, not 144. “We had to move four [launches] from last year and add them to this year,” he said when clarifying that he did mean to say 148.

At the end of 2023, SpaceX ran into some bad luck with both infrastructure to launch its rockets and poor weather at both its launch sites. This lead to several launches not making it onto its 2023 launch manifest and reduced the company’s total launches for the year to 96.

It looks like SpaceX wants to keep its original 144 missions it has planned for this year and just add on the missions it missed last year. However, that now means SpaceX must average at least 13 launches each month in 2024 to hit that goal, and January has not made it there.

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This might be one of SpaceX’s hardest challenges yet

My new years resolution is to be less negative and more optimistic towards SpaceX’s 2024 launch goal. While the company doesn’t look like it will be hitting its 13 launch benchmark this month, it does look like it will get to 10 launches. The same number of launches Rocket Lab, the US launch provider that ranks just below SpaceX in most launches in a year, did all together in 2024.

That number beats SpaceX’s January 2023 launch number which was seven.

To complete this feat, SpaceX will need to launch a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy every two and a half days. If they spread them out equally over each of its three launch pads, which they won’t but this is a good analogy, that’s one launch a week from each pad.

Can SpaceX do this? Well if anyone can it will be them. However, this high of a launch rate will push infrastructure that has not been designed for this sort of rate, or at least has not seen this rate before. While most of the key parts are controlled by SpaceX, some are not. The Eastern and Western ranges are controlled by the Space Force, the FAA oversees all commercial rocket launches, even the providers of propellents come from local contractors.

Any problems that show up will need a solution by SpaceX anyways as the future launch rates of Starship will push what we think is possible now to the extremes. The company hopes to learn as much as it can about those limitations with the Falcon program now, rather than wait for Starship to be ready.

There is nothing showing that these areas will slow SpaceX down, but it will be an experiment to see if there are any roadblocks in the current system.

I am truly optimistic that SpaceX will hit this goal, or at least come near it, both scenarios will be wins for the company and industry if they do so. I just won’t go around saying that SpaceX will launch 148 times this year but that they are attempting to do just that.