By launching 31 rockets into orbit and placing thousands of satellites there last year, SpaceX beat its own launch record. The Hawthorne-based business also made great strides on fresh projects including its Starlink worldwide broadband service and its enormous Starship spaceship, which it plans to put into orbit for the very first time.
The upcoming 12 months seem to be the busiest SpaceX has ever experienced. Here is a glance at the current status of some of the company's most important initiatives.
Starship Program:
NASA's Artemis mission, which aims to send people back to the moon in the coming decade, will employ Starship, a large launch vehicle created for interplanetary space travel, as a lunar lander in 2021.
The rocket was successfully launched 10 kilometres into the air and returned to SpaceX's testing facility in Boca Chica, Texas, last year after a number of unsuccessful attempts.
The Starship's maiden orbital flight test, which SpaceX hopes to carry out this year, could help to assess how prepared it is for upcoming space missions.
Future expansion plans for SpaceX include the Starship in large measure. The vehicle might be used to launch a significant number of satellites and transport a significant amount of goods into space, in addition to making it possible for people to travel to the Mars and the moon.
It took SpaceX many months to land Starship prototypes safely, and Elon Musk, the chief executive of SpaceX, allegedly issued a warning to staff members that delays in the manufacture of the rocket's engines had put the business on the point of bankruptcy.
The project is still moving forward, and in January SpaceX unveiled a model of the launch tower for the spaceship that, according to Musk, would eventually be used to "capture" rockets that are returning to Earth.
Missions with Crew
2020 saw the launch of SpaceX's first crewed mission, and since then, four flights carrying both astronauts and civilian personnel into space have been successfully flown.
SpaceX will start a venture with space tourism firm Axiom Space Inc. in the coming year that will transport three humans to the International Station. The journey, whose launch is planned for March, is anticipated to be the first entirely private expedition to the space-station.
Starlink Enlargement:
In-house-built satellites that will form the backbone of a worldwide broadband network that SpaceX started testing in 2020 have been launched by the corporation in numbers totaling about 2,000 since 2019. The service is accessible in portions of North America, Europe, and Australia, and as further satellites are launched, coverage is anticipated to increase.
In support of the Starlink program, which has been marketed as high-speed internet, accessible to customers in rural regions in particular, the business eventually expects to launch over 10,000 satellites.
Nearly 150,000 people presently use the service, but it has been difficult for the firm to meet the demand for its infrastructure in part because of supply issues, which delayed the construction of the terminals required for customers to get a transmission from the company's satellites.
Capturing Carbon
Musk tweeted in December that SpaceX has begun a programme to "take (carbon dioxide) out of the atmosphere and transform it into rocket fuel."
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Although the statement is far from a detailed plan, it was made less than a year after the XPrize Foundation competition was announced, which would have given students, researchers, and entrepreneurs the chance to compete for $100 million donated by Elon Musk's charitable foundation in the hopes of developing carbon removal systems that might help to lessen the impacts of climate change.
Although Musk emphasised that the technology "will also be vital" for the company's planned flights to Mars, it is unclear when such a carbon capture device would be developed.
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