CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — With a record setting year of launches behind them, SpaceX is already gearing up for a busy 2023.
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The successful launch of its EROS C-3 mission late Thursday night was the 61st Falcon 9 launch of the year, setting a record for most launches of a single vehicle type in the same year.
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Now they’ve set a target date for what will be their first launch of 2023.
SpaceX will attempt to launch another Falcon 9 rocket to low-Earth orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station on Tuesday, January 3 in the sixth mission of its smallsat rideshare program. The launch window opens at 9:56 a.m.
For SpaceX’s first launch of 2023, we’re targeting 9:56 a.m. ET on Tuesday, January 3 for Falcon 9’s sixth dedicated smallsat rideshare mission to orbit https://t.co/bJFjLCiTbK
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) December 30, 2022
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The flight will have 114 different payloads, including CubeSats, and orbital transfer vehicles carrying spacecraft to be deployed at a later time.
Following first stage separation, the Falcon 9 booster will land back at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Landing Zone 1. The same booster has previously been used for multiple launches, including the second Transporter mission and 10 different Starlink missions.
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On average, SpaceX says it completed a launch from one of its three sites every six days in 2022 with 92 percent of them done on “flight-proven” first stage boosters.
Their 61 launches of 2022 nearly doubled their record of 31 launches set in 2021.
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