The next scheduled launch is Crew-1, from Kennedy Space Center, on 15 Nov, at 00:49 UTC (18th Nov 19:49 EST).

All the facts, stats and info on SpaceX!

Since their inception in 2002, SpaceX have brought about a revolution in space flight, being the first private company to launch a payload into orbit, the first to send a private spacecraft to the International Space Station, and the first to propulsively land, and subsequently re-use, an orbital class booster. They were also the first, and might remain the only, company to launch a car into space with the epic maiden flight of Falcon Heavy in February 2018...

This website was launched in order to try and summarize the company's achievements so far. These pages are a growing collection of information, statistics and other interesting data regarding SpaceX, and its activities. There is a complete list of launches, and some basic stats based on this list, available via the menu at the top. I'll also keep a link to the latest SpaceX webcast in the section below. Having just launched the site in early 2019, it will be expanding in the coming months to include more features as time permits.

A Brief History of SpaceX...

SpaceX was founded on 6th May 2002 by Elon Musk. The company's stated objectives are to enable the colonization of Mars and, in order to achieve this, to lower the cost of space transportation and access to space in general. One of the main reasons that space travel is so expensive is that more-or-less none of the hardware that has previously flown has ever been re-used (even the Space Shuttle required extensive overhauls between flights, including replacement of many thermal tiles on the orbiter, and the complete overhaul of the solid rocket boosters - a costly process which took months). First stage boosters would be expended into the ocean, and even manned spacecraft that were built to withstand re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere would never fly twice. Therefore reusability has been at the heart of SpaceX's decision making, and design and manufacturing processes.

Falcon 1 was the first rocket developed by SpaceX. It was however fully expendable, since the technology to reuse boosters had not yet been developed. Standing at around 21m (68ft) tall, it had a payload to low Earth orbit capacity of around 420-500kg, although it never carried any more than 180kg before the vehicle was retired. After some initial launch delays and failures, the Falcon 1 achieved fame when it became the first privately funded launch vehicle to put a payload into orbit in 2008, on its fourth flight. After its 5th flight in 2009 it was retired in favour of development work on the new Falcon 9 rocket.

The Falcon 9 is a much more powerful and significantly larger vehicle than Falcon 1. Whereas Falcon 1 was powered by a single first stage Merlin engine, the Falcon 9 has nine of them. The first version of the Falcon 9 could lift up to about 10 tonnes to low Earth orbit. Recall that this is around 20 times more than Falcon 1, and later iterations of the rocket increased this ratio further. The Falcon 9 was designed with reusability of the first stage booster in mind. Remarkably, it only took just over 5 years from the maiden flight of Falcon 9 in 2010, to the first successful landing of a booster in 2015. At which point they became the first organisation in the world (including governments) to achieve this feat. The following graphic illustrates the sequence of steps in bringing the first stage back to Earth.

More recently, in 2017, SpaceX announced development on what will probably be the final iteration of the Falcon 9 design, the Full Thrust Block 5. This version has the highest power engines of any Falcon 9 variant. It also includes a large number of improvements on earlier designs to aid in quick turnaround times, and therefore lower operating costs overall. The maiden flight of the Block 5 was in May 2018, and since July 2018, all Falcon 9 launches have been Block 5 variants.

In order to launch even heavier payloads, SpaceX also developed the Falcon Heavy, which finally saw its maiden flight in February 2018 after many years of delays. Essentially this is composed of 3 first stage Falcon 9 cores strapped together, with the middle core supporting a second stage and payload. Having 27 first stage engines at its disposal, the Falcon Heavy can lift up to 63.8 tonnes to low Earth orbit in a fully expendable configuration, or around 30 tonnes with full re-use of the boosters. The difference is due to extra fuel requirements for the re-entry and landing burns. This extra fuel diminishes the available payload capacity to orbit.

Falcon 9 & Falcon Heavy first stage boosters are intended to be reusable for up to about 10 launches with minimum maintenance. In theory up to about 100 launches are possible with periodic refurbishments. SpaceX now hopes to re-use as many Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy cores as possible over the coming years to service any future missions. This will allow them to divert resources away from construction of Falcon boosters, and instead focus on the Starship project, which is intended to be the vehicle that will ultimately take humans to Mars.

The first suborbital tests of Starship are planned for late 2019 or early 2020, on a test vehicle referred to as Starship Mk1, currently being constructed and prepared in Boca Chica, Texas. This is a test bed for the technology that will be used on future Starship missions, both to the Moon and Mars. SpaceX signed up their first passenger for a trip to the Moon on Starship, a Japanese billionaire named Yusaku Maezawa, in 2018. The trip is tentatively scheduled for 2023 and would take about a week to slingshot around the Moon and return to Earth. It would not land on the surface however.