This Week in Launch: Rocket Lab and Virgin Galactic enter the chat

This week Rocket Lab will reattempt its first launch of 2024 and possibly Virgin Galactic will fly Friday on one of its final missions before it goes quiet. For SpaceX however, this month has been far below its 13 launches a month goal, although this year’s start looks to be stronger than last year’s.

This Week’s Launches:

• January 22 (Monday)
  • CAS Space | Kinetica 1 | Third Flight | 11:05 P.M. ET
    • Site 130, Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
• January 23 (Tuesday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 7-11 | 4:35 P.M. PT
    • SLC-4E, Vandenberg Space Force Base, California
• January 26 (Friday)
  • Virgin Galactic | VSS Unity | Galactic-06 | TBD
    • VMS Eve, Spaceport America, New Mexico
• January 27 (Saturday)
  • Rocket Lab | Electron | Four Of A Kind | 1:15 A.M. ET
    • LC-1B, Māhia Peninsula, New Zealand
• January 28 (Sunday)
  • SpaceX | Falcon 9 | Starlink Group 6-38 | 6:04 P.M. ET
    • LC-39A, Kennedy Space Canter, Florida

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Virgin Galactic to fly one of its final VSS Unity missions

As soon as Friday, Virgin Galactic plans to fly its Galactic-6 mission using VSS Unity and VMS Eve as the mothership. This will be the company’s 11th flight overall and first for 2024. However, it will be one of VSS Unity’s last, with the company expected to cease flights mid-year to prioritize their next generation space planes.

On board this mission there will be four paying customers and two Virgin Galactic employees who will pilot the vehicle. Unlike previous missions, there will not be a dedicated “astronaut trainer” in the back to assist customers. This opens up more revenue for Virgin Galactic on each flight, with four paying customers per flight rather than just three.

The four on this flight have not been named but come from the United States, Ukraine, and Austria.

Coverage of Virgin Galactic’s launches have been reduced to live updates via the company’s social media feed. I would expect much of the same for this mission.

SpaceX is far from hitting its monthly quota

A rather disappointing item about this week and even month is that it only features two Falcon 9 launches, one of which was a delay from last week. The company has a goal to launch 148 rockets in 2024 and its VP of launch said it has to do 13 launches a month to get ahead of any issues it could run into at the end of the year.

So far SpaceX has only launched six times this month (and also this year). In 2023, SpaceX started its first month with seven launches total, this year the company is on track to beat that at least by two with another launch schedule for the 29th.

With a launch goal so high, there won’t be a lot of room for months below the average. However, we did see a late push in 2023 that took SpaceX from being far from reaching its 100 launch goal to only missing it due to unfortunate weather and mechanical delays.