ARS Technica by Eric Berger - 2/3/2022
The Falcon 9 also recently surpassed the space shuttle in total flights.
SpaceX has been launching Falcon 9 rockets thick and fast of late. With 10 launches since the beginning of December, the company has flown rockets at a rate greater than one mission a week. And another launch could happen as soon as today, shortly after noon (18:13 UTC), with a Starlink satellite launch planned from Florida.
Lost amid the flurry of activity are some pretty significant milestones for the Falcon 9 rocket, which made its debut a little more than a decade ago.
Number of launchesThe Falcon 9 rocket has now launched a total of 139 times. Of those, one mission failed, the launch of an International Space Station supply mission for NASA, in June 2015. Not included in this launch tally is the pre-flight failure of a Falcon 9 rocket and its Amos-6 satellite during a static fire test in September 2016.
Since the year 2020, the Falcon 9 has been the most experienced, active rocket in the United States, when it surpassed the Atlas V rocket in total launches. Globally, the still-flying Russian Soyuz and Proton rockets have more experience than the Falcon 9 fleet. The Soyuz, of course, remains the king of all rockets. It has more than 1,900 launches across about a dozen variants of the booster dating back to 1957, with more than 100 failures.
The Falcon 9 reached a notable US milestone in January, equaling and then exceeding the tally of space shuttle launches. During its more than three decades in service, NASA's space shuttle launched 135 times, with 133 successes. To put the Falcon 9's flight rate into perspective, it surpassed the larger shuttle in flights in about one-third of the time.
More:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/02/spacexs-falcon-9-rocket-has-set-a-record-for-most-consecutive-successes/
