As of 25 November 2024[update], rockets from the Falcon 9 family have been launched 415 times, with 412 full mission successes, three failures,[a] and one partial failure. Designed and operated by SpaceX, the Falcon 9 family includes the retired versions Falcon 9 v1.0, v1.1, and v1.2 "Full Thrust" (blocks 3 and 4), along with the active Block 5 evolution. Falcon Heavy is a heavy-lift derivative of Falcon 9, combining a strengthened central core with two Falcon 9 first stages as side boosters.[1]
The Falcon design features reusable first-stage boosters, which land either on a ground pad near the launch site or on a drone ship at sea.[2] In December 2015, Falcon 9 became the first rocket to land propulsively after delivering a payload into orbit.[3] This reusability results in significantly reduced launch costs, as the cost of the first stage constitutes the majority of the cost of a new rocket.[4][5] Falcon family boosters have successfully landed 376 times in 388 attempts. A total of 43 boosters have flown multiple missions, with a record of 23 missions by a booster. SpaceX has also reflown fairing halves more than 300 times, with some being reflown for at least twenty times.[6]
Typical missions include launches of SpaceX's Starlink satellites (accounting for a majority of the Falcon manifest since January 2020), Dragon crew and cargo missions to the International Space Station, and launches of commercial and military satellites to LEO, polar, and geosynchronous orbits. The heaviest payloads launched on Falcon are batches of 24 Starlink V2-Mini satellites weighing 17,500 kg (38,600 lb) total, a configuration first flown February 2024,[7] landing on ASDS. The heaviest payload launched to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) was the 9,200 kg (20,300 lb) Jupiter-3 on 29 July 2023. Launches to higher-orbits have included DSCOVR to Sun–Earth Lagrange point L1, TESS to a lunar flyby, a Tesla Roadster demonstration payload to a heliocentric orbit extending past the orbit of Mars, DART and Hera to the asteroid Didymos, Euclid to Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2, and Psyche to the asteroid 16 Psyche.
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