Mass Value Report for December 2024

Evaluating a years worth of development in space

This is the last report of the year, where I will review 2024 in spaceflight, how my own predictions panned out, and make some for 2025.

It has been a remarkable year for spaceflight, most of all for SpaceX who remain the clear leader in the industry. They have broken records with the Falcon rockets and Starlink satellites yet again, supported the first private spacewalk, and accelerated the Starship program - most notably with the dramatic booster catch on Flight 5 in October.

There have been setbacks and delays - Blue Origin was supposed to fly New Glenn twice this year and finally join the orbital reusable rocket race, but their Mars shot was delayed and their Blue Ring pathfinder mission has been delayed until the first week of January. There have been three significant anomalies in Falcon 9 flights, delaying that program as well.

Ultimately 2024 saw 134 Falcon flights. For comparison, the Space Shuttle flew 135 times in 30 years, so even with setbacks this is a remarkable achievement. Here is what the cumulative flight rate graph for the whole year looks like:

The 2022 and 2023 lines are scaled up to represent a 57% year-on-year growth rate, which 2024 was on track for until the anomalies, represented by vertical red lines. Not only did the delay after the first and third anomalies push the cadence off track, there was also a slight slow down when flights resumed. The uptick towards the end of the year might be an indication of the Falcon team regaining confidence after the years setbacks.

I’ve been following this in my monthly Mass Value Reports all year, so lets see how I did.

My Predictions

• January: Noting a number of stand-downs due to weather, I compared the ratios of January launches to annual launches for previous years, and predicted 128 launches in 2024.

• February: Revised this prediction to 132, with a linear extrapolation of 122

• March: Revised to 134, but only 30% mass increase due to increased in RTLS flights. Also after IFT-3, predicted 6 Starship flights, 3 carrying payload

• April: Revised up to 144 - this was close to the SpaceX target at this point in the year of 148

• May: Revised down to 143. Now predicted 4 Starship flights (IFT-5 in August and IFT-6 in November) and no payloads based on 83 day gap between IFT-3 and IFT-4. Anticipated New Glenn getting first payload launched in September based on public statements