For the last couple of years, SpaceX has been shaving hours off its booster turnaround timelines. This has turned months-long turnarounds into weeks; last week, SpaceX finally got that timeline down to just nine days! The company also just recently broke a launch pad turnaround timeline as well.
Last week, Thursday, SpaceX launched a batch of likely Starshield satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office’s proliferated architecture for surveillance satellites, designated NROL-57. This was the program’s eighth flight overall and has been able to reap the benefits of SpaceX’s rapid satellite manufacturing and launch cadence.
This was also SpaceX’s 450th Falcon 9 launch, a great milestone in itself. However, SpaceX hit another milestone with the reflight of Falcon 9 booster B1088 for its fourth time.
Booster 1088 debuted last November on a mission similar to NROL-57, launching Starshield satellites from Vandenberg. Since then, it has flown a rideshare mission, Transporter-12, with 131 satellites on board, and then flew NASA’s SPHEREx and PUNCH missions earlier this month. All flights took place from SpaceX’s West Coast launch site, SLC-4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base, California.
This timeline puts B1088 at a turnaround time of nine days, the company’s fastest yet. This beats SpaceX’s previous record of 14 days between the Starlink 6-69 and 12-1 missions on B1080 last November.
That wasn’t the only record SpaceX beat this month. On March 15, SpaceX launched its Starlink Group 12-16 mission from SLC-40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida. As we’ve come accustomed to now, SLC-40 sees a lot of launches these days, mostly Starlinks.
This mission set a new record for launch pad turnaround, at just under two days and nine hours.
For Starlink, SpaceX usually uses these missions to push what it can do with its boosters. Whether they’re the most used boosters in the fleet or turnaround times, SpaceX is pushing to see when its Falcon 9 might fail because of reuse. So far, nothing public has come forward regarding any hard limits.
SpaceX’s motivation for pushing what is possible with speedy turnarounds comes from its need for real-world knowledge of how to turn a launch pad around as quickly as possible for its Starship rocket. Starship is designed from the ground up to be 100% reusable and rapidly relaunched.
That means multiple launches a day from the same launch pad with the same hardware. While Starship in its current form has been able to start testing these theories, SpaceX can gather some data from Falcon 9.
Excluding the potential hourly launch rate SpaceX wants Starship to be capable of, Falcon 9’s turnaround times will be much slower (by SpaceX’s definition). What started out at 100-day turnarounds quickly shrank to 20-30 days, which seems to be the norm.
A booster’s turnaround is less about SpaceX’s ability to get it ready than about finding a mission for it to fly on. While SpaceX has plenty of Starlink missions to fly, those will soon move to Starship when it can begin orbital flights. With that, less than two-week turnaround times are likely to go away, but for the time being, that could become the new norm.
I would expect SpaceX to continue to shave minutes and hours where they can to keep seeing how much refurbishment is really needed for flight and just how fast they can do it. Could sub-one week turnarounds be possible? I’ll answer that with another question: did anyone think sub-two week turnarounds were possible?
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