SpaceX

History

Catalog — Rockets

• 2006

  Falcon 1 Sheet pending

• 2010

  Falcon 9

  The Falcon 9 is the launcher that rewrote the rules of space access: a two-stage rocket whose first stage comes back, lands upright and flies again — something the industry considered economically impossible until SpaceX made it routine. It was born from NASA's commercial programme of the mid-2000s, when the agency chose to buy transportation from private companies rather than design its own rockets. SpaceX, coming off the small Falcon 1, answered with a nine-engine launcher that debuted on 4 June 2010. On 21 December 2015 it achieved the unprecedented: setting an orbital rocket's first stage back down on solid ground. Reuse has not been an experiment since — with drone-ship landings at sea, boosters accumulating dozens of flights and a launch cadence without precedent in history. Today the Falcon 9 is the workhorse of Western space access: it carries astronauts to the space station, deploys the Starlink constellation and launches more times per year than all its competitors combined, at a price per kilogram that redefined the market.

• 2018

  Falcon Heavy

  Falcon Heavy is a partially reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle designed, manufactured and operated by the American company SpaceX. Its architecture consists of a center core onto which two Falcon 9-derived boosters are attached, with a second stage mounted on top of the core; Wikipedia's data sheet accordingly describes it as a 2.5-stage vehicle. Nine Merlin 1D engines fire on each of the three bodies at liftoff. It has the second highest payload capacity of any currently operational launch vehicle, behind NASA's Space Launch System, and the fourth-highest of any rocket ever to reach orbit, trailing only SLS, Energia and the Saturn V. Quoted capability reaches 63,800 kg to low Earth orbit when fully expended, 26,700 kg to geosynchronous transfer orbit and 16,800 kg to Mars. Recovering the boosters lowers that figure, and recovering the center core as well brings it below 50,000 kg. Its maiden flight on February 6, 2018 carried Elon Musk's Tesla Roadster as a dummy payload, with a mannequin dubbed "Starman" in the driver's seat. Although designed to be capable of carrying humans beyond low Earth orbit, SpaceX stated it does not intend to fly people on Falcon Heavy or to pursue human-rating certification for it. Both Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 are expected to be eventually superseded by Starship.

• 2023

  SpaceX Starship Sheet pending

  Versions (2)

  • Block 1
  • Block 2