Mass Value Report for March 2024

Tracking how likely or not it is for SpaceX to reach their ambitious launch target this year, and whether the debut of operational Starship flights will maintain the pace.

This year is a pivotal point for SpaceX. They have disrupted the launch industry completely with Falcon 9 and first stage reuse, and are poised to do so a second time with Starship and full reuse. But there is a problem - whilst Falcon has overshot most expectations, Starship is substantially late. This could mean the growth of SpaceX stalling and giving competitors a chance to catch up.

What has put SpaceX so far ahead is several years of exponentially ramping cadence, which I’ve found to be at a compounding rate of 43%. There are indications that, in 2024, that rate might be slowing, and will soon level off at a maximum, forming an S-curve. So Starship needs to start delivering payloads to continue growth at the previous rate.

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Falcon Cadence

For the past two months we’ve been looking at how close SpaceX are to achieving Elon Musk’s target of 144 Falcon launches this year. Here is the updated model:

The central projection for the year continues to rise - up from 132 last month to 134 flights per year this month, edging closer to Musk’s stated target. This substantial revisions month-on-month show the limitations of a linear method, but I’m trying to be as conservative as possible here.

There was supposed to be a second launch on March 31st, from the West coast, but this was delayed due to weather. Had this flown, the central linear extrapolation would have been 140. This mission will fly on April 2nd, and arguably this shows that the month boundaries are arbitrary for this task. This is true, but doesn’t invalidate comparing the performance X days into a year with how previous years performed up to that date, and how that translated into annual cadence.

Going back to the mass model I have been using; recently Elon Musk announced a new upper limit of drone ship return Falcon 9 mass which is 100kg higher, going from 17,400kg to 17,500kg. This is a small difference, but I have now factored it in by adding this to the capacity of each booster with the serial number used on that flight (B1069) or higher.

The projected mass for 2024 is only a 30% increase over 2023 - a substantial drop off. The reason that this differs significantly from the launch cadence projection is that there is a much larger proportion of Return To Launch Site (RTLS) flights - I count them as adding only 13,000kg of capability (13,100kg for newer boosters). It may be that performance increases in Falcon rockets mean this is a underestimate, and that SpaceX are flying more RTLS missions because these now have better payload capacity.

Going forward, I’m going to be looking at the overall launch market, rather than just focus on SpaceX, for my mass models. Below I’ve added two other significant players; United Launch Alliance, including all Atlas, Delta and Vulcan flights, and the Long March series of rockets launched by the Chinese.

SpaceX still very much dominates this graph, with Long March rockets coming in second. But it should be clear this is a relatively recent phenomenon. I will be adding other launchers as time goes on, based on their relevance to the overall figure.

This aggregate amount of mass to orbit grows on average at 41%, measuring from 2019 onward, compared to the 43% growth from SpaceX flights alone over the same period. It doesn’t at this stage paint that much of a different picture then, but its useful to have a complete model and I anticipate new reusable rockets such as New Glenn and Neutron might change the situation.

It looks then, that the meteoric growth of Falcon 9 might be slowing and reaching the top of the S-curve, and no other provider is yet filling the gap. Fortunately, Starship will soon be taking over.

Starship Begins

This month has seen the third test flight of the Starship full stack IFT-3, which reached orbital speed (albeit not at a velocity that allowed orbit. Neither component survived but the ascent burn was fully successful. Preparations are proceeding rapidly for IFT-4, scheduled for May. Now is the point at which Starship needs to be added to the projected mass model.