Mass Value Report for October 2024

Can we project the growth curve of Starship from information we have already?

The catch of the booster from Starship Flight 5 is still ringing in all our ears, weeks later. Both it and Flight 4 exceeded my expectations, and I think the expectations of most other SpaceX watchers. Even Elon Musk thought it would take 3 flights to get the catch right and I was impressed that the Ship survived reentry both times despite some damage to the heat shield. On the back of these flights, the incredible promise of Starship is suddenly starting to feel much more tangible. These aren’t renders anymore.

Compared to the original stated timeline for Starship - unmanned flights to Mars in the 2022 window and human flights this window - the program is at least 4 years behind schedule. There was a gap of almost two years between the last suborbital test of the upper stage and the first full stack flight, whilst the necessary upgrades were made to the launch site. I think that many people have over-corrected towards pessimism in reaction to this. A lot of the barriers to an increased launch rate have been passed now, and we can expect many more launches in 2025.

Before getting on to this, lets have a look at how Falcon rockets are getting on, after 3 anomalies this year.

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.

For the light blue area projecting future flights I used the average flight rate after the first return to flight, with the gap from the third flight also removed from the series, giving a flight rate of around 0.35 flights/day. This projects to a final total for the calendar year of 126, the same as I projected last month.

Despite not hitting an arbitrary target, let us not lose site of how incredible this is. Falcon has now reached around 400 flights - more than half of which have occurred since the beginning of 2023. A small regression to the mean of the cadence is hardly cause for worry. Falcon still utterly dominates the launch market, and will for a little while.

Until, of course, Starship reaches its full capability…

Starship Acceleration

The goal of the Starship project is not just full reuse but rapid reuse - which would surely mean at least reaching the flight rate of Falcon rockets. However, during the current testing program, there are still months between flights. In fact, Starship has not yet beaten the flight rate of the Saturn V during the peak of the Apollo program in 1969, as the chart below shows: