Mass Value Report for January 2024

In the first month of 2024, there have been some setbacks for Falcon 9 - is it time to worry yet?

SpaceX has a target of 144 launches for this year, but in January there have been a number of launch scrubs which no doubt impact cadence. At the target rate, they need an average of 12 flights per month. If they don’t hit this in January, is 144 flights likely to happen?

At some point there will be an upper limit of how many flights per year Falcon 9 can fly, and perhaps we are seeing the first indications of the approach of that limit

The Falcon Model

First, we shall compare this January’s cadence to that of previous years. SpaceX launched 10 Falcon 9 boosters in this month, compared to 7 in January 2023. By looking at the ratio between total flights and flights in January going back to 2017, the first year where there were more than 12 flights and so the expected number of flights in January was greater than 1, we can get an estimate of how many flights to expect this year.

The predicted cadence is 128, falling short of the target. This would still be an impressive annual growth rate o…