Tim Dodd

In this case, the destination is the International Space Station.

um and uh yeah so they developed those relatively quickly and uh became a commercial success before you know it they're now the number one launch provider in the world launching more mass to pay to orbit than anybody else launching more frequently than um countries like the entire country of china who's going crazy right now with launches granted china beat them by two launches this last in 2022 but

Prior year, SpaceX beat the entire country of China.

I mean, it's nuts.

Exactly.

Some of them were literally like 100 kilograms or something, you know, like not large payloads.

Yes, but right now their biggest customer is actually themselves with Starlink.

One of the biggest reasons they've launched so much mass to orbit is because Starlink is designed around the payload fairing and the payload capabilities of the Falcon 9 rocket.

So, you know, because they're vertically integrated, because they build their own satellites, because they're building their own rocket, they can literally design a system that's, you know, another manufacturer might have made a more square satellite that was heavier or something, but SpaceX looked at it from a blank slate and said, here's our constraints.

our payload mass constraints, our volume constraints.

And they made a funky looking satellite.

Things like the size of a, you know, it's like a table folded up, which isn't anything I've, you know, really ever seen before.

So, but it's purpose built to fit as efficiently as possible inside their fairing and inside the capabilities of that rocket.

So therefore,

Because they're launching those like an insane amount, you know, a dozen, you know, 40, 50 times a year or whatever.

They're just putting up insane amounts of mass like we've never seen before.

The very first Falcon 9s had a square array of engines.

It had like a three by three by three grid of their Merlin 1 engines, the 1Ds.

And I think it only lasted, I don't remember if it was two or four flights before they went into this octo-wode configuration where there's eight, like a ring of eight engines with a center engine in the middle.

Still in the same diameter that the rocket was, the fuselage was more or less the same 3.7 meter wide diameter, but the actual thrust structure changed.