Mass Value Report for December 2023

A review of the past month and of the year of 2023 - and how my model stacked up.

Now that 2023 is over, I have complete data for a year in launch that I’ve been tracking through these mass value reports, I can compare my projections to the final result to see how they stack up.

This one will be fairly brief - I’m working on upgrading the model to take into account more data, so that mass value reports in 2024 will have even more value.

The Falcon Model

Here is the complete chart for Falcon launches up to the end of 2023:

There were 96 flights in 2023, representing 43% growth (31% without starlink) and 1680 tonnes to LEO capacity. When I first started publishing these analyses in March the projection was for a year-on-year growth rate of 34% and 80 flights, so clearly the cadence. Going back through the data, it appeared I initially dropped one of the 2 launches on March 17th - although this hasn’t made a huge different to the figures aside from having previous estimates of total flights off by 1.

Obviously cadence has picked up this year, given the disparity, so I thought it useful to look at the quarterly rate of growth. To make it a bit smoother, for each quarter the value is given for the year up to that quarter. The result is that the smoothed rate rises 11% per quarter or 53% annually.

Musk has given a target of 144 flights next year - that is exactly a 50% increase on the 2023 rate. Two VPs at SpaceX confirmed this figure and mentioned the key problem of supplying second stages:

This suggests that the top of the S curve for Falcon 9 won’t be too far away. Last month I was considering 200 or 300 flights per year as the maximum. Jon mentions that shipping 2.5 stages a day is very challenging, so is shipping them near daily as would be required for 300/year possible? Bear in mind that it would have to be constant at that rate, and as he points out a single supplier delay would slow the whole process down. With Starship in test flights, does SpaceX want to invest in making Falcon 9 second stage manufacture even more rapid?

The Starship Flight Rate