SpaceX on a Roll

Continuing our look at recent U.S. launches, we turn our gaze to Elon Musk’s scrappy start-up, SpaceX.

In poker terms, the California-based company now holds three of a kind….three 5’s, that is. They’ve had 5 largely successful flights of its Falcon 9 rocket (with one secondary payload placed in the wrong orbit), 5 flights of the Grasshopper test bed, and 5 flights of the Falcon 1 rocket with a pair of successes and a trio of failures. There also have been four successful flights and recoveries of the Dragon spacecraft.
The table below shows SpaceX’s launch history since its first flight in 2006.

SpaceX Launch History

Things didn’t start very well for the company, with the first three Falcon 1 flights failing. But, Musk and his team turned things around with the fourth launch, which the SpaceX founder has since admitted was a make or break one for the company. They have not had a catastrophic failure since.

So, what lies ahead for the company? Lots. The company has 41 launches listed on its manifest through 2018. This list includes 10 Dragon cargo resupply missions for NASA to the International Space Station and a number of commercial and government satellites.

Of the 41 launches, 38 of them will be conducted using the medium-lift Falcon 9 launch vehicles and three with the Falcon Heavy rocket. A Falcon Heavy demo flight is currently scheduled for 2014.

Meanwhile, the Falcon 9 continues to evolve. A larger version of the rocket with more powerful engines is set to make its debut later this year. SpaceX’s eventual goal is to recover both stages of the rocket for reuse.

Twelve Dragon missions are on the manifest through 2018, 10 to deliver cargo to ISS and two stand-alone flights of DragonLab, which will carry microgravity experiments into orbit.

Additional Dragon flights could be added to the manifest if NASA selects SpaceX to become a provider of crew transportation services to ISS under the Commercial Crew Program. The company could make the first demo flight of a human-rated Dragon as early as 2015.

SpaceX might add even more flights to this manifest once it gets certified to launch U.S. military and national security payloads. It will be several years before it can compete in this lucrative market.

The big question is whether SpaceX can conduct all these launches as planned. Musk’s company has big ambitions, but its schedule has had an unfortunately tendency to slide to the right. With its rockets and Dragon freighter still evolving and the company deep into NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, SpaceX has yet to reach a point where it can produce and launch its rockets on a regular timetable like ULA and Arianespace.

There is an enormous amount of work ahead for SpaceX’s relatively young workforce, which is accustomed to routinely putting in 60 hour weeks. Burnout and turnover rates are of definite concern as the launch rate increases.