The launch of a rocket into orbit should never become routine.
There was a time, probably around the 50’s and 60’s that a rocket launch hit the headlines.
Now its just another launch. Last year (2024) saw a record breaking 263 launches.
The US launched 158, China launched 68 and other countries/regions like Europe, Russian and Japan.
Last year just 224 launches were completed and two years ago in 2022, 168 launches were completed.
Surprisingly perhaps, prior to 2020 the record was set at 141 back in 1967, the future of rocket flight still seems quite alive!
Surprisingly perhaps, rocket flight in its purest form dates back centuries with its origins in ancient China.
The 9th century Chinese were recorded to have fired gunpowder propelled bamboo tubes at their enemies in the first examples of rocket flight.
Modern rocketry only began to take shape in the 20th century thanks to the work from engineers and scientists like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Robert Goddard.
Tsiolkovsky’s theoretical work laid the foundations for rocketry, while Goddard successfully launched the first liquid-fuelled rocket in 1926 in the United States.
During World War II, rocket technology advanced rapidly driven sadly for the search for weaponry not exploration.
The development of the V-2 rocket by Germany marked the first long-range ballistic missile while the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union further accelerated rocket development.
Eventually this lead to the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 and the Apollo 11 Moon landing in 1969 and in the years that followed rocket launches for missions to explore distant planets and the establishment of space stations.
Perhaps one of the most spectacular developments over recent years and 2024 saw this demonstrated beautifully, spacecraft landing back successfully under rocket control. SpaceX have been driving this technology forward at pace firstly with the landing of their Falcon rockets on drone ships but last year saw a real milestone.
October saw the 5th test flight of the SpaceX Starship launch vehicle. Its the tallest launch vehicle to have flown, beating the Apollo Saturn V rocket by 11 metres.
After its launch on 13 October and the upper stage being delivered into a suborbital trajectory (reached space but didn’t complete an orbit before returning) the booster returned!
It didn’t just disintegrate or flat down attached to parachutes, it used the powerful Raptor engines to return to the launch pad.
After descent, it slowed, almost hovering in mid air, before manoeuvring sideways to line up with launch pad before touching back down. As it returned to the arms of the launch tower, the arms grabbed the rocket and the engines shut down!
It is no doubt that 2024 saw some amazing developments in rocket flight including but not limited to the SpaceX booster landings.
What of 2025? What can we look forward to in the year ahead?
Well I’m not sure we are going to see any pure rocket launch landmarks this year but there are some exciting missions ahead; NASA launching SPHEREx (new space observatory to map the sky in optical and near-infrared,) SpaceX launching to missions to surface of Moon (Texas built Blue Ghost and a Japanese lander,) a new commercial space station called Haven-1 and if all goes to plan we may finally see the return to Earth of Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore who have been stuck on the ISS since June after their planned 1 week mission!
This article was originally published by Universe Today.
