In article ,
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On 2021-03-14 08:04, Jeff Findley wrote:

That's 9 launches and landings for booster number B1051. We're coming
up on 10 launches and landings for this booster. That's something that
critics said would never happen. Looks set to happen this year.

BTW, my criticisms were based at the time on no data supporting. People
were claiming Musk had proved it could be reused many times when at best
we had single re-use at the time.

And yes, they have now shown rockets can be re-used many times, and I
wouldn't be surprised it it goes beyond 10. However, what we don't know
is the *average* work needed to turn it around, and how many relaunches
have the same engines etc.

That's something only SpaceX knows.

As I recall, their record is of roughly 1 month turn around, and that is
pretty amazing. But it doesn't show that all landings result in such
quick/inexpensive turn arounds. (though I am pretty sure they are
learning about what makes a flight that allows quick turn around and
what causes more refurb is getting more and more known).

But do note that the time between launches only hints at how long it
takes to turn around a booster. We don't really know the actual effort
it takes.

And while the reused-9 times is good, another recent trend is the
frequency of launches. This gives SpaceX a lot of experience/data on
re-usability. And despite being a young company compared to the legacy
big guys, if it hasn't surpassed their launches already, it soon wil.

I believe at this point Falcon 9 Block 5 has flown more times than Atlas
V. So, SpaceX is now exceeding the launch experience of ULA in some
ways.

According to Wikipedia Atlas V has launched 85 times with one partial
failure and Falcon 9 has achieved 112 out of 114 full mission successes.
And more than 74 cores have been successfully recovered (according to an
article on Feb 16 and I know more have been successfully recovered
since).

So the number of successful core recoveries of Falcon is approaching the
number of successful Atlas V missions. That, in and of itself, is
impressive.

But Irrespective of this, it still makes launches orders of magnitudes
cheaper.

Glad to see you finally agree with this.

Canada gave a $600 million grant/gift to Telesat (formerly a Canadian
company, now part of Hughes) to develop a low earth orbit constellation.
There is no way that anyone can compete against SpaceX because Starlink
launches are not only orders magnitudes cheaper than what Telesat could
hope to get, but has access to far greater number of launch slots to
deploy thousands much faster.

I really don't see anyone else being able to do LEO constellations.

Actually there are several companies that have deployed, or plan to
deploy, LEO constellations. Competition is a good thing.

Jeff
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