SpaceX Launches 50th

SpaceX Launches 50th Falcon 9 Rocket

The workhorse rocket just hit the half-century mark.

By Jay Bennett

SPACEX

On June 4, 2010, the Falcon 9 rocket took to the skies for the first time, launching from Cape Canaveral carrying a dummy model of SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft. In the first hour of Tuesday, March 6, Elon Musk's space company reached another milestone, launching its 50th Falcon 9 from the same launch pad that hosted the maiden flight almost eight years ago.


Since its first flight, the Falcon 9 has grown more than 50 feet and gained some 600,000 lbs. of additional thrust thanks to engine upgrades. Today's Falcon 9 Full Thrust provides a payload capacity of more than 50,000 lbs. to low Earth orbit, more than twice the lifting capability of version 1.0 back in 2010.


Falcon 9 Flight 1.
MATTHEW SIMANTOV / WIKIMEDIA

In the years since then, Falcon 9 became the first orbital-class rocket in the world that can return for a controlled propulsive landing, by land or by sea, to fly another day. SpaceX pulled off the first successful Falcon 9 first stage landing in December 2015, then relaunched one of its recovered boosters for the first time in March 2017.

The 50th launch carried the Hispasat 30W-6 satellite to geostationary transfer orbit for a Spanish communications company. The half-century mark for Falcon 9 represents the accelerated rate that SpaceX has begun to fire off rockets from Florida and California. To hit 50 launches, Falcon 9 took about seven years and nine months, compared to the nine years and seven months it took for the similar-capacity United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket to reach that many launches.

Last year, Falcon 9 launched 18 times, more than double the number of launches in 2016, and this year the California-based aerospace company hopes to launch nearly 30 rockets. As SpaceX hits its stride, landing and relaunching Falcon 9s and eating up launch industry market share, the company plans to keep its foot on the gas pedal to extend its lead in the commercial launch business. Falcon 9 took almost eight years to hit 50 flights, but the rocket, due for one final upgrade to the more powerful Block 5 version, could very well hit 100 launches before 2020.