Mass Value Report for August 2024

A return to flight, then another anomaly in a flight leader - are the recent Falcon 9 woes an indications of problems in the program, or mere bad luck?

There has been another anomaly with a Falcon booster in less than two months, and another stand down of the vehicle. On landing, the first stage booster seemed to come down hard, catch fire and topple over onto the deck of the drone ship.

Credit: SpaceX

For several years, Falcon launches have been getting more and more frequent, and has racked up an impressive run of successes before the two recent anomalies. SpaceX have increased both the manufacturing rate of the second stage and the rate at which they can turn around first stages. Both of them have now seen failures in quick succession, so is this an indication of a limit to the rate at which the system can be launched? Is the top of the S-curve in sight?

The annual growth rate of the last few years of around 43% is vital to achieve one million tonnes to LEO per year by 2050, which is the goal Elon Musk has set for SpaceX. A lower growth rate would still allow for an impressive expansion of space capability. So why this target? Musk believes it is what is needed to create a city on Mars, and I agree on the estimate. But the reason he wants to do it by 2050 seems to be simply that he cannot expect to live much longer than that.

This also applies the Jeff Bezos and his vision as well. Founder led companies have a focus that can be lacking in more managerial ones, so its important to accomplish as much as possible while the founder is still around. If SpaceX or Blue Origin don’t at least get close to their ultimate objectives by the time Musk and Bezos retire or die, its not likely whoever ends up in control of these companies will bother - they will most likely just asset strip them or extract maximal quarterly profits and dump the expensive long term visions. It has happened many times before.

But where does this time pressure leave Falcon 9 as a system going forward? It is interesting that the most recent failure occurred on the most used booster. Could we be seeing the back end of the bathtub curve for this vehicle?

Falcon Cadence

First I’m going to show the regular mass model with the flight data we have

Despite the long term trend of 43%, the model only predicts a 28% increase over 2023 in terms of mass to orbit. A linear projection of the years number of launches gives roughly the same result with 128 flights as the central estimate. This is well below the target SpaceX publicly set for themselves.

But such projections aren’t entirely fair in this case, as the stand down periods after the two recent in-flight anomalies aren’t representative of the likely cadence going forwards. The second anomaly only resulted in a 3 day stand down, so won’t have much impact, but for a more realistic projection we should model the first stand down correctly.

The First Return to Flight

Once SpaceX got flying again after the second stage anomaly in July, the cadence quickly returned to its prior rate. The stand down lasted for 15 days, a period during which at typical rates SpaceX could be expected to launch around 6 rockets.

The chart below of cumulative flights shows a projection which takes this into account: