SpaceX Launches Three Falcon 9 Rockets in 36 Hours

SpaceX has accomplished three Falcon 9 launches in less than 36 hours, demonstrating the company’s commitment to increasing launch cadences in 2022. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in February that the business’s objective was for “Falcon [to] launch around once a week” throughout the year, soon after a NASA oversight panellist disclosed that the company was seeking 52 missions in 2022.

Musk had also tweeted in October 2020, maintaining a record of excessively aggressive SpaceX launch cadence ambitions, that “a lot of upgrades” would be required to meet his goal of 48 launches in 2021 — an average of four launches per month. In the end, SpaceX fell far short of that goal, although it did establish a new yearly record of 31 launches in a year, exceeding the previous record of 26 missions set in 2020 by almost 20%. However, perhaps even more significant than the new record was the fact that, by the end of 2021, SpaceX had completed six launches in four weeks.

SpaceX’s accomplishment of three launches in 36.5 hours is only a continuation of that record. SpaceX conducted three of the six launches in 69 hours during the same four-week timeframe towards the end of 2021. SpaceX accomplished it again two months later, launching three Falcon 9 rockets in 67 hours from all three of its Falcon launch sites.

More crucially, throughout the first half of 2022, SpaceX has maintained an average cadence of more than one Falcon launch per week, completing its 26th launch of the year on June 19th and planning two more launches before the end of the month. That pace has been maintained by SpaceX for even longer. SpaceX has accomplished 32 Falcon 9 launches in less than seven months since November 24th, 2021.