Mass Value Report for November 2024

The Starship program is accelerating - when will it take over from Falcon?

This month saw the sixth test flight of a full stack Starship, and the fourth this year. The ascent went well, with all engines performing properly, but the booster catch that was expected had to be aborted due to a problem with the tower. There appeared to be some damage to a mast on top of it after the vehicle had taken off, and Musk reported that there had been communications difficulties. The booster performed a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, which was filmed, and seemed in better condition than the Flight 5 booster as it did so.

Later on, the ship performed an impressive daylight reentry and landing in the Indian Ocean. It had a large number of tiles removed, and an older model of heat shield installed, to test the limits of the system and it still survived reentry and performed the flip and landing.

The most important milestone for this flight, though, was relighting a Raptor engine in space.

Credit: SpaceX

All Starship flights thus far have been suborbital, with the ship on a trajectory close to orbit but that will automatically reenter the atmosphere. The vehicles have had the capability of flying to orbit, but without assurance of the ability to perform a deorbit burn, there was a risk of leaving a very large piece of space debris to undergo an uncontrolled reentry later on which would have the potential to cause damage on the ground - it would be comparable to the reentry of Skylab in 1979 which left large pieces of debris in Australia. Demonstrating an engine relight means that future Starship flights can take payloads to orbit, and continue testing recovery of booster and ship whilst doing so.

Flight 6 also represents a milestone in cadence - it beat the turnaround record for a vehicle in this class, occurring 37 days after Flight 5 compared with Apollo 11 flying 59 days after Apollo 10.

The Falcon Curve

Last month I modeled the cumulative rate of Falcon 9 flights against scaled flight rates for the past two years, by 57% per year. These two years of increase have been unusually fast - and for a while it looked as if this new higher pace might continue in 2024.

November showed a significant pick up in pace compared to previous months - 16 flights in 30 days versus 11 flights in 31 days in October - but this still is not enough to regain the momentum of the previous two years and first half of this year. Falcon rockets are on track for 138 flights this year, if December retains the same rate as November.

One interesting piece of information is the recent announcement by Elon Musk that there would be “over 150 flights” in 2025