The Falcon 9 rocket has been launched a total of 140 times, with one mission failed: the launch of the International Space Station resupply mission for NASA in June 2015. Since 2020, the Falcon 9 has been the most successful active rocket in the US when it surpassed the Atlas V rocket in total launches.
On a global scale, the still-flying Russian Soyuz and Proton rockets have more launches than the Falcon 9. The Soyuz certainly remains the king of all rockets. It has over 1,900 launches of about a dozen launch vehicle variants since 1957 with over 100 failures.
In January, Falcon 9 hit a notable milestone in the US, equaling and then surpassing space shuttle launches. In more than three decades of operation, NASA’s Space Shuttle has been launched 135 times, 133 of them successfully.
At current rates, the rocket could make 500 flights before the end of this decade. However, SpaceX is also actively working on launching the Starship rocket. The success of the Starship project will likely ultimately determine how long the Falcon 9 stays in service.
Falcon 9 brilliantly showed itself in terms of security. Following the failure of Amos-6 during a static fire test, SpaceX completed a record streak of 112 consecutive successful Falcon 9 missions. There are only two other rockets with a streak of successful flights comparable to the Falcon 9. One is a variant of the Russian Soyuz-U rocket, which was launched 786 times between 1973 and 2017. The other is the American Delta II rocket, which has recently “retired”.
In 2022, Elon Musk’s company expects to conduct 52 launches.
Source: ixbt
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