SpaceX is stretching the lifetime of its reusable Falcon 9 boosters

The late-night liftoff of a Falcon 9 rocket with another batch of Starlink Internet satellites on Sunday set a new record for the most flights by a SpaceX launch vehicle, with a first-stage booster flying for a 16th time. SpaceX now aims to fly its reusable Falcon 9 boosters as many as 20 times, double the company’s original goal.

The flight followed several months of inspections and refurbishment of SpaceX’s most-flown rocket, a process that included a “recertification” of the booster to prove, at least on paper, that it could fly as many as five more times after completing its 15th launch and landing last December.

Sunday night’s mission got the booster’s extended life off to a good start.

The record-setting rocket took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 11:58 pm EDT (03:58 UTC) with 22 second-generation Starlink satellites. The rocket’s nine kerosene-fueled Merlin engines fired for about two and a half minutes to climb to the edge of space, then the booster detached to descend toward a landing on one of SpaceX’s landing platforms floating northeast of the Bahamas.

An upper-stage engine ignited to continue propelling the Starlink satellites into orbit. SpaceX declared the launch a success following the deployment of the Starlink payloads about an hour after liftoff. The company’s global Internet network now has about 4,400 satellites in orbit, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks spaceflight activity.

SpaceX plans to haul thousands more Starlink satellites into orbit in the coming years to add to the network's capacity, which now has more than 1.5 million subscribers.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket, itself standing about 15 stories tall, settled onto the deck of the drone ship less than nine minutes after launch, using thrust from its center engine to slow for touchdown. It was the 46th launch by SpaceX’s Falcon rocket family this year, an average cadence of one flight around every four days.

“The Falcon 9 first stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time,” said Kate Tice, a SpaceX engineer hosting the company’s launch webcast. “Today’s landing marks our 206th overall landing of an orbital class rocket, including Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions.”

It was SpaceX’s 216th successful mission in a row for the Falcon rocket family, a record unmatched in the history of space launch vehicles.

The booster flown Sunday night, numbered B1058 in SpaceX’s inventory, debuted with the company’s first launch of astronauts in May 2020, sending NASA crew members Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken toward space on the Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission. That mission ended a nearly nine-year gap in US launches carrying astronauts into orbit.

SpaceX’s fleet-leading booster has now launched 801 spacecraft and payloads, plus two astronauts, in more than three years of service.

This is Falcon 9’s second booster life extension

Bill Gerstenmaier, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said in May that engineers were in the process of certifying Falcon 9 boosters for up to 20 flights for Starlink missions. Launches with customer satellites may be limited to rockets with lower flight counts. NASA has only certified reused Falcon 9 boosters with five or fewer flights for the agency’s astronaut missions going to the International Space Station.

“That gives us a lot of capability to continue to reuse boosters and continue to keep flying,” Gerstenmaier said. “I think we are able to meet our manifest, plus some, with the boosters that we’ve got in work.”

SpaceX’s latest iteration of the Falcon 9 rocket design—called the Block 5—flew for the first time in 2018. At that time, SpaceX had the goal of launching each Falcon 9 Block 5 booster 10 times. With boosters still coming back in good shape after each flight, SpaceX extended the life to 15 launches and landings, according to a report last year by the trade magazine Aviation Week & Space Technology.

The magazine reported that SpaceX put booster components through vibration testing to four times the fatigue life of what they would experience over 15 flights, giving engineers confidence that the rockets will continue to fly successfully.

The company has around 16 flight-proven Falcon boosters in its fleet, with several more new-build rockets slated to fly by the end of the year. Each mission requires a brand new upper stage. Reusing the first stage and payload fairing not only cuts the company’s internal launch cost—a figure that is believed to be less than $30 million per Falcon 9 flight—it unlocks a higher flight rate without straining the factory.

SpaceX started the year with the goal of flying 100 missions in 2023, the most flights in a year by any launch provider. SpaceX flew 61 times in 2022. The Falcon 9 continues to be the workhorse for the launch industry as SpaceX tests its much larger Starship vehicle, which engineers designed to eventually be fully reusable with an even faster launch cadence.

But the main limitation of SpaceX’s blistering launch rate is not the availability of flight-ready rockets—it’s the turnaround of the company’s three Falcon 9 launch pads. SpaceX has flown out of Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station as often as once every five days. The Falcon 9 launch pad at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California can be set up for another mission in fewer than 10 days.

SpaceX’s other fully operational launch site, at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, is currently the only pad to support crew and cargo flights to the space station and the sole facility designed for the Falcon Heavy rocket. Those flights have taken priority at Kennedy’s Launch Complex 39A, and it takes up to three weeks to reconfigure the pad when alternating between Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy missions.