CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A Falcon 9 rocket launching from Cape Canaveral last Friday marked the 44th SpaceX mission through a record-breaking first half of the year.
Now, the challenge for Elon Musk’s team is to ramp up the success even more if SpaceX can reach 100 launches this year as Musk set as its goal.
After launching 61 times in 2022, a yearly record to date, Dr. Ken Kremer of SpaceUpClose.com said SpaceX is on a phenomenal pace through the first six months of 2023.
“Certainly, seems like they can get to 80, maybe 90,” Kremer said. “I don’t know about 100. It will be real close.”
[TRENDING: Become a News 6 Insider]
Over 50 missions are on tap from July through December, including Saturday — the scheduled start of the six-year Euclid telescope mission to study what scientists call the dark side of the universe.
The European Space Agency shared an interview with its flight operations director, Andreas Rudolph.
“Euclid is a mission that is a cosmological mission looking back 10 billion years into the past and the evolution of our universe,” Rudolph said.
The most powerful rocket in the universe, another test flight of Starship, is another of the high-profile SpaceX launches in the second half of the year.
With Starship’s first fully integrated flight in April ending in an explosion, this week SpaceX conducted a test firing of the next Starship spacecraft that will launch.
Despite launch pad damages from the first attempt, Musk said the second test flight could happen in the next two months.
Saturday’s launch is now scheduled for 11:12 in the morning.
You can watch the launch on News 6 and ClickOrlando.com.
Get today’s headlines in minutes with Your Florida Daily: