The SpaceX Falcon 9 Revolution
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has revolutionized space access. While most other rockets are still being launched once and dropped into the ocean à la the 1950s, the Falcon 9 has landed over 100 times and a single booster has performed 11 flights. But, while it is the most technically advanced rocket in the world, SpaceX Chief Engineer Elon Musk has already declared it deprecated and is working on an even more revolutionary replacement. Since we may be on the eve of the Falcon 9 being eclipsed, I wanted to revisit its history through visualization, to take stock of how far the Falcon 9 has come so as to judge how far Starship could go.
I ended up creating animations of their launch histories so that by watching them it would help me relive the sequences of events. The first visualization showcases the launch history of the Falcon 9 itself, and it also tracks the cumulative launches of SpaceX’s active booster fleet, plus their cumulative payload launched to orbit:
For the second visualization (here and here) I wanted to get a sense of SpaceX’s progress relative to its competitors, so I juxtaposed their launch history with that of ULA and Arianespace (the US’s and Europe’s incumbent launch service providers, respectively):
These visualizations aren’t supposed to be direct comparisons between the companies since ULA and Arianespace were launching rockets before the Falcon 9’s first flight in 2010. But they are useful for comparing their relative launch cadences over the years they were all active.
Highlights
Creating these visualizations showed me things I’d never seen before in the Falcon 9’s history, and it also dramatically rendered things that I’d previously only vaguely imagined. Below I’ve excerpted some of the highlights I found in the data.
Highlight 1: Effect of the Groundings
This first highlight — actually a lowlight — comes at the end of 2016 when SpaceX was at its nadir versus its competitors. In the four years it took the Falcon 9 to achieve its first formative launches, its competitors had racked up dozens. SpaceX was betting heavily on being able to recover their boosters to make them reusable and more economical, but that had only achieved inconsistent results.
Then SpaceX suffered the loss of the CRS-7 commercial resupply mission for the International Space Station. This put them on a six-month launch hiatus while their competitors continued widening their lead. SpaceX returned to flight in 2016, and for a while they were even equaling the launch cadences of their competitors. — Until they lost payload Amos-6, not during flight but from exploding on the launch pad. Another hiatus followed, during which Arianespace crowed that SpaceX customers were now flocking to them for contracts, but that they only had so many openings — and they didn’t see the need to create more.
This may have been the low point for the Falcon 9. At least SpaceX was beginning to land boosters successfully, but these early rockets were found to be incapable of flying again. With reusability still unrealized, the ability to land a booster was just a gimmick that hadn’t returned any value. The aerospace incumbents felt assured that SpaceX’s ambitions were no threat to their market share.
Highlight 2: The Block 4 Wave
Things changed in 2016 and 2017 with the introduction of the improved Full Thrust and Block 4 versions of the Falcon 9. Using the lessons learned from the first recovered boosters, these new rockets were sturdy enough to stick the landing and be refurbished for another flight. This led to SpaceX building up a massive inventory of landed boosters:
The wave peaked at 10 after the launch of Iridium NEXT-3. But the Full Thrust and Block 4 versions were only durable enough to launch and land twice, so every rocket was retired or expended after its second mission. This created a drawdown where SpaceX suddenly seemed to be back to square one with only one recovered booster in its inventory.
But this time was different. This one booster was a Block 5.
Highlight 3: Block 5 Reuse Milestones
Elon Musk had announced the Block 5 as the final iteration of the Falcon 9, designed to achieve reuse milestones of ten, fifty, and a hundred flights per booster. The only thing left was to prove it, and you can judge the progress:
In 2018 a booster made the first third flight.
In 2019 a booster made the first fourth flight.
In 2020 a booster made the first fifth, sixth, and seventh flights.
And in 2021 a single booster made it all the way up to eleven flights — which broke my visualization and forced me to implement a line wrapping feature, as seen above.
SpaceX currently has a fleet of over a dozen active boosters, four of which have accomplished double digit flights.
Highlight 4: The Megaconstellation Effect
In the above image there are many launch squares colored dark green, which I’ve used to indicate Starlink launches. Starlink is a planned “megaconstellation” of tens of thousands of satellites meant to provide worldwide broadband internet. It’s actually only one of several such constellations planned by US, European, and Chinese companies, in what perhaps constitutes the first bonafide space race since Yuri Gagarin. I’ve colored all megaconstellation launches this way, which one can see in Arianespace’s own launches for the OneWeb constellation:
It’s also interesting to note that Starlink launches dominate the high-cardinality reflights of Falcon 9s. This is because SpaceX is its own customer in these cases, so they’re willing to risk using more heavily flown rockets because they understand them better. This shift was also necessary because, by 2019, SpaceX had begun launching so quickly that they’d exhausted their external customer supply. In the aerospace industry, typically it’s the satellites that are sitting around for years waiting for a rocket to launch them, but for the first time SpaceX had a huge inventory of rockets sitting around waiting for satellites to be launched.
Highlight 5: The Ruler of LEO
Once all the latest launches have been factored in, some interesting details emerge:
- SpaceX has now launched more flights than either ULA or Arianespace since 2010, and it has cumulatively launched over 1,000 tons to space, or just over one hundredth the mass of a Ford-class aircraft carrier.
- Because of reuse, SpaceX has accomplished 143 launches with only 67 first-stage boosters. ULA and Arianespace are technically outproducing SpaceX in boosters; they’re just doing less with them.
- SpaceX has launched by far the most missions and tonnage to low-Earth orbit (LEO), in large part due to Starlink launches. ULA and Arianespace have still conducted more launches to higher orbits.
Reflections
Visualizing the Falcon 9’s history impressed upon me how much it’s a thrilling tale of innovation and revolution, full of heartbreak and comeback. But I was also impressed to find that, against this dizzying backdrop, its competitors’ histories were these obliviously monotonous scrawls of “business as usual.” ULA’s and Arianespace’s launches in 2010 were disposable rockets with no attempts at recovery, and their launches in 2022 are just the same.
And this gulf will probably widen in 2022. Yes, ULA plans to debut its new Vulcan Centaur rocket, as does Arianespace with its new Ariane 6, but neither of these rockets will be reusable. It’s tough to see how they’ll be relevant in a world being reshaped by the Falcon 9. If nothing else changed, it could take another ten years to fully realize the impact the Block 5 will have — but there won’t be ten more years. Starship is coming now. The clock started ticking back when the first Falcon 9 landed; and once Starship makes it to orbit, time’s up.
References
The data for these visualizations was parsed from the following Wikipedia pages:
- List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Atlas_launches_(2020%E2%80%932029)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Thor_and_Delta_launches_(2020%E2%80%932029)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ariane_launches_(2020%E2%80%932029)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Vega_launches
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_at_the_Guiana_Space_Centre
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-2
I parsed these using BeautifulSoup, then built the visualizations as bespoke web pages using jQuery, Underscore.js, Anime.js, and old-school terrible CSS.
