It’s hard to believe that it is 2025 already, to start the year we are going to take a step back and review what happened in 2024 in Space.
Launches
It was a record-breaking year for launches with 253 successful launches, 2 partially successful launch and 6 failures.
SpaceX
Leading the charge again this year was SpaceX with 138 launches across Falcon 9 (132), Falcon Heavy (2) and Starship (4). It wasn’t all successful with one of the Falcon 9 launches resulting in a failure of the second stage and lose of the Starlink satellites. They also lost a booster during landing and a second stage burn issue caused it to burn up in the wrong trajectory. However, they quickly recovered from each of these to continue the record-breaking year.
They made significant progress with Starship development this year with four flights. The first flight in March resulted in the loss of both vehicles, booster during the ocean landing attempt when only 3 of the 13 engines needed to slow down lit. The ship burned up during reentry due to lose of attitude control that resulted in it spinning during that phase of flight. The other three flights were much more successful with both booster and ship making controlled returns as designed. On the 3rd flight of the year, they also made the first successful catch of a booster using the launch tower arms.
Rocket Lab
It was also a record-breaking year for Rocket Lab with 16 launches, 14 orbital Electron and 2 sub-orbital Haste.
They also made significant progress on their next generation Neutron rocket with visible developments at their launch site in Wallops (MARS), numerous tests of their Archimedes engine and pictures of the rocket hardware.
ULA
ULA completed 5 launches this year and passed two milestones, the final launch of the venerable Delta Heavy and the first launch of the new Vulcan Centaur rocket.
The launch of Vulcan ushers in a new era for ULA as they move to a new fuel and engine combination using the Blue Origin build BE-4. The second flight suffer a slight anomaly when the engine bell on one of the side boosters broke away, however, the rocket was able to compensate for the loss of thrust and delivered the payload as intended.
They were expected to launch two NROL payload on Vulcan before the end of the year but that didn’t happen, and at present there has been no news about the certification of Vulcan that was expected after the second launch.
Blue Origin
Blue completed 4 New Shephard launches this year, during the fourth mission included the 100th woman to reach space.
They also made significant progress on their New Glenn launch vehicle which resulted in a 7 engine static fire test on December 28th. While they had hoped originally to launch this year that is now scheduled for early January.
ESA
It was a slow year for ESA with only 3 launches two on Vega and the other the first launch of the new Ariane 6.
After years of development the Ariane 6 finally lifted off, however, an anomaly occurred during the flight that resulted in this being classed as a partial success. One of the APU’s that provide power to the upper stage failed resulting in the stage not being able to deorbit.
China
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