SpaceX completed its last launch of the year, celebrating 5th anniversary of its first successful recovery of the booster

On December 22, the US space exploration technology company SpaceX just completed its last launch in 2020, and its Falcon 9 rocket booster made new achievements. This is also the 20th successful recovery of the SpaceX Falcon booster, breaking the company’s previous record, and celebrating the 5th anniversary of its first successful recovery of the booster.

SpaceX completed the last launch of this year on December 19, sending a US spy satellite into low earth orbit (LEO), and the Falcon 9 rocket booster B1059 returned to landing zone 1 (LZ-1), achieving 12 the fifth successful recovery within a month. This mission, called NROL-108, was SpaceX’s 26th launch this year, breaking the previous annual record of 21 launches.

In addition to making the Falcon 9 rocket the world’s most launched rocket in 2020, and proving that SpaceX’s annual launch rhythm of more than 40 times is not a delusion, the launch of NROL-108 also helped SpaceX achieve the milestone of booster recovery, that is, distance It has been 5 years since the first successful recycling. On December 21, 2015, SpaceX successfully recovered the first Falcon 9 rocket booster.

As of the completion of the NROL-108 mission, SpaceX has continuously recovered 20 Falcon 9 rocket boosters without any failure during the period, breaking the previous record of 19 times. It is worth noting that SpaceX set this record after the failed booster recovery in March 2020. In other words, SpaceX has successfully recovered 20 boosters in a row in just 8 months.

In addition to the successful recovery of all boosters in 2017, SpaceX will encounter one or several recovery failures each year, including two in 2020. However, as SpaceX continues to prove that the Falcon 9 rocket booster can indeed achieve the design goal of not less than 10 launches per launch, recovery failures have become increasingly rare.

As of the NROL-108 mission, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Falcon Heavy rocket booster have been successfully recovered 70 times in the past 5 years. In other words, in the 105 successful launches of the Falcon rocket family, almost two-thirds have successfully achieved one or more booster recovery.

However, SpaceX’s ambitions have just begun. Its CEO Elon Musk recently revealed that it plans to launch 48 times in 2021, which is almost twice the number in 2020. As time goes by, it is certain that SpaceX will reclaim more boosters next year.