SpaceX's Falcon 9 completes 31 missions in just 6 months; Elon Musk brags on Twitter

Elon Musk’s SpaceX has tied its record of 31 launches made last year in just seven months into 2022. The record-tying mission took off on July 17 from the Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) of the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida with a new batch of 53 Starlink satellites. This marked the company tying its own record of most launches in a year and is heading for over 60 launches, a target set by Musk himself. 

Following the achievement, SpaceX took to Twitter and revealed that the Falcon 9 has launched approximately 351 metric tons of payload to the low-Earth orbit. The payloads ranged from astronauts to scientific experiments to the International Space Station (ISS) along with Starlink "to provide global high-speed internet, as well as many other critical payloads for our commercial & gov customer (sic)".

Elon Musk reiterates plan to go multi-planetary

Taking pride in his company's success, Musk said that Falcon 9 has launched "About twice as much useful mass to orbit as rest of Earth combined". Replying to another tweet about SpaceX's milestone, Musk wrote, "It’s a start. About 1000 times more mass to orbit per year will be needed to make life multiplanetary".

Apart from the overall record, two of the Falcon 9's booster have made records of their own by flying for a record 13 times and redefining reusability. Notably, the concept of reusable rockets is why Musk established SpaceX in the first place, as he believes that reusable rockets would allow for cheaper and frequent launches, something that is necessary to make humans a spacefaring civilisation. 

As for Starlink, the company operated by SpaceX now has over 3,000 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO) and is providing high-speed internet in 30 countries. These countries are mostly from Europe along with those in the North and South Americas. Meanwhile, if SpaceX manages to maintain its current pace, it could beat the record of the most number of launches by a single rocket class within a month. According to Teslarati, this record is held by the Soviet Soyuz-U rocket which conducted eight launches in just 28 days in 1980.