List of SpaceX Contracts
I couldn’t find a list of known SpaceX launch contract values, so I made my own list with all the F9/FH launches I could find prices for. The list will be updated over time.
Category: SpaceX
SpaceX Stories: The very first intern talks about SpaceX early days and working on Dragon
In another installment of our SpaceX Stories series, we bring you a 2017 interview with former SpaceX employee Daniel Frolich. He was actually the very first intern the company hired back when SpaceX had just 15 employees and was located in El Segundo. The interview contains some interesting stories from the early days of SpaceX and also from Dragon development.
How realistic is Elon Musk’s plan to launch the same Falcon 9 twice in one day?
Elon Musk has claimed in the past that the extremely quick 24-hour Falcon 9 reusey might happen in 2017 or 2018. This was yet another one of his overly optimistic statements, because two years later, SpaceX seems to be far from achieving such a feat. So I thought about what it would take to reuse a booster in one day, what it might look like and what is preventing it from happening.
Fairings might only be reused on Starlink missions until Mr. Steven catches one
SpaceX’s fairing recovery efforts are gearing up again after a 3-month-long slow period caused by Mr. Steven suffering damage in late February. Luckily, Mr. Steven has now been fixed and should be ready in time to try to catch a fairing in about a month. In the meantime, SpaceX has been recovering fairing halves by landing them in the ocean. I have a theory that until Mr. Steven manages to catch a fairing, we’ll only see reused fairings on Starlink missions.
Starlink Compendium
One of SpaceX’s many ambitious projects apart from colonizing Mars and achieve rapid rocket reusability is to build Starlink, a huge satellite constellation in low Earth orbit, which will provide fast internet connectivity around the world. This article provides an overview of all the important information about Starlink, and will be updated over time.
List of Dragon Capsules
Maintained list of all produced Dragon 1 and Dragon 2 capsules and key information about them plus lots of photos. The list will be updated over time.
Falcon 9 will launch dozens of Starlink satellites and there could be up to 7 such launches this year
Over the past few months, SpaceX has been quietly preparing to launch the first batch of satellites for Starlink project, its global internet constellation. The launch is planned for May 16 on a Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral. More missions like this one could take place this year.
NASA Will Soon Use Dragons and Falcon 9 Boosters That Had Flown Twice Already
On Saturday, Falcon 9 successfully launched a reused Dragon capsule to the ISS as part of the CRS-17 mission for NASA. At a press conference that followed, we learned more about the problems that caused the delay on Friday, as well as NASA’s plans for Falcon and Dragon reuse. It turns out that by the end of the year, we might see CRS missions that will fly Falcons and Dragons that had been used twice before.
SpaceX Stories: How Elon Musk Inspired Employees Following a Third Falcon 1 Failure
In another installment of our SpaceX Stories series, former employee Dolly Singh describes working for Elon Musk by sharing a story of how he inspired his workers after Falcon 1 failed to launch for the third time in a row back in 2008.
SpaceX Stories: How Did SpaceX Rocket Engines Get Their Names
Tom Mueller has been designing rocket engines at SpaceX since the company was founded in 2002. He helped develop the Kestrel, Merlin, Raptor and more. But how did these engines got their names? Luckily, Mueller was kind enough to share the story.
