SpaceX Averages One Launch Per Week in 2022 With More to Come – CNET [CNET]

Elon Musk’s rocket company has been going to space once a week on average so far in 2022, with its 10th launch of the year planned for Wednesday. 

In the 10 weeks since the start of the New Year, SpaceX will have pulled off as many Falcon 9 launches, provided the March 9 Starlink mission to loft 48 small broadband satellites to low earth orbit goes as planned.

If the company keeps up the weekly pace all year, it’ll smash its previous record of 31 blastoffs in a calendar year, set in 2021. 

Musk once said he’d like to see his reusable rockets launched, landed and turned around for another launch in 24 hours. There are, however, a number of logistics challenges to launching the same booster on back-to-back days. That said, with the ability to launch from multiple pads in Florida, California and Texas, SpaceX certainly has the capacity to launch different rockets on the same day — it did so in one 24-hour period in December. 

So far this year, SpaceX Falcon 9 boosters have carried six batches of Starlinks to orbit, a European Earth observation satellite, a classified spy satellite and a rideshare mission filled with more than 100 small satellites. 

Flight 10 for the year is set to blast off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 5:45 a.m. PT Wednesday. The booster is the same one that launched the European Cosmo-SkyMed satellite on Jan. 31.

Several minutes after launch, the Falcon 9 first stage will return to land in the Atlantic on the A Shortfall of Gravitas droneship. You can watch the mission above; the webcast will begin about 15 minutes before liftoff. 

SpaceX tentatively has at least one more Starlink launch planned for this month, as well as the Axiom-1 mission to carry a crew of commercial astronauts for a stay on the International Space Station.