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Elon Musk is the public face of SpaceX but there are lots of other extremely talented people at the company who sort of live in Musk’s shadow. One of them is Tom Mueller who was in charge of engine development at SpaceX during the most crucial years.
Interesting situation happened during preparations for Dragon’s first mission in 2010. It illustrates how SpaceX takes a very different approach to solving problems compared to most aerospace companies.
SpaceX is preparing for the first Starhopper flight and two Falcon 9 launches, Musk’s secretive company Neuralink will make its first public announcement, and Tesla will announce its financial results for the record-breaking second quarter. All of this will be followed by Musk’s presentation about the Starship rocket, which has undergone many design changes in recent months.
I couldn’t find a list of known SpaceX launch contract values, so I made my own list with all the F9/FH launches I could find prices for. The list will be updated over time.
Elon Musk has claimed in the past that the extremely quick 24-hour Falcon 9 reusey might happen in 2017 or 2018. This was yet another one of his overly optimistic statements, because two years later, SpaceX seems to be far from achieving such a feat. So I thought about what it would take to reuse a booster in one day, what it might look like and what is preventing it from happening.
SpaceX’s fairing recovery efforts are gearing up again after a 3-month-long slow period caused by Mr. Steven suffering damage in late February. Luckily, Mr. Steven has now been fixed and should be ready in time to try to catch a fairing in about a month. In the meantime, SpaceX has been recovering fairing halves by landing them in the ocean. I have a theory that until Mr. Steven manages to catch a fairing, we’ll only see reused fairings on Starlink missions.
One of SpaceX’s many ambitious projects apart from colonizing Mars and achieve rapid rocket reusability is to build Starlink, a huge satellite constellation in low Earth orbit, which will provide fast internet connectivity around the world. This article provides an overview of all the important information about Starlink, and will be updated over time.
Maintained list of all produced Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 capsules and key information about them plus lots of photos. The list will be updated over time.
Over the past few months, SpaceX has been quietly preparing to launch the first batch of satellites for Starlink project, its global internet constellation. The launch is planned for May 16 on a Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral. More missions like this one could take place this year.
On Saturday, Falcon 9 successfully launched a reused Dragon capsule to the ISS as part of the CRS-17 mission for NASA. At a press conference that followed, we learned more about the problems that caused the delay on Friday, as well as NASA’s plans for Falcon and Dragon reuse. It turns out that by the end of the year, we might see CRS missions that will fly Falcons and Dragons that had been used twice before.
