Mass Value Report for January 2025

A new player joins the space race

Its been an exciting month in spaceflight - the debut of New Glenn, another Starship catch, and two lunar landers launched in a single flight. 2025 is already shaping up to be an exciting year in space.

Continuing straight on from last month, I want to update my predictions as I go - looking at what will be the most significant players this year - Falcon, Starship, and New Glenn. Firstly Falcon, which still remains the biggest source of mass to orbit and won’t be dethroned this year.

Falcon Cadence

Elon Musk has predicted more than 180 launches for 2025, and I guessed 185 would be the final figure.

By simply looking at the ratio between January flights and total flight since 2020, we can get an estimate of 160 flights this year, with the 1σ limits being 128,191, so things appear to be going fine so far.

This is a crude estimate though, and there is another way to work this out though - look at growth with a higher time resolution. How is SpaceX cadence changing month to month, for instance?