Ever since space exploration became a daily human activity, it was not confined to state players. Sure, because this whole thing started as a political battle between two great powers, governments have always had first dibs on what went up into the space around our planet and further out in the solar system. But private companies have always been involved in making hardware and launching it on behalf of various customers.
It wasn’t until the arrival of SpaceX onto the space exploration scene that it became obvious private companies can play a much bigger role in exploration than just serve as fulfillers of government wishes. And that’s because Elon Musk’s company managed to make a reality from something NASA has been dreaming about since the 1960s: reusable rockets.
The first rocket to take off and land was the Falcon 9, which lifted off (and then came back down without crashing) in June 2010. Since then, the family has performed over 200 missions with an incredibly high success rate.
Last year alone, SpaceX sent its rockets up no less than 61 times. For reference, that’s once every six days, and makes for a third of the total launches performed by all the global players in this industry combined.
The interesting part about all the numbers above is that they’re mostly tied to commercial, and not military or government missions. The biggest sign, if there was any more need for one, is that civilians are finally getting ready to take over Earth’s orbit.
SpaceX currently does its business from four launch sites. There’s its very own Texas facility, known as Starbase, the place from where the upcoming Starship is expected to take off soon on its first orbital flight. Then, there’s the Space Force Vandenberg base, and of course the two NASA facilities, the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A and the Cape Canaveral Space Launch Complex 40.
Like all space launches, SpaceX’s departures are very spectacular in nature and almost always draw crowds to the vicinity of launch sites. Sadly for all the people going there, they can only see one launch at a time. But what if we told you someone compiled all the SpaceX launches ever made from Cape Canaveral into a single video, so you can experience them all in one place?
That someone is space animation specialist Hazegrayart, and the video is a little over four minutes long. That may not seem like much, but keep in mind it crams together no less than 13 years of Falcon rocket launches.
The vid starts very unremarkably, with just the two departures SpaceX was capable to achieve in 2010, and keeps being so up until 2013. From 2014, we see the number of Falcon 9 departures grow to five, then to six, to eight, and 12 in 2017. From there onward the timelapse video shows so many such events that they become impossible to count, departing and landing at an incredible rate.
Not all launches were successful, and Hazegrayart was careful to include those in the clip as well. And we also get to see the departure of the Falcon Heavy that back in 2018 took a cherry red Tesla Roadster to space, effectively turning a car into a spacecraft.
You can enjoy all that, and more, in the video attached below. More importantly, you can now easily imagine how the future of our species will look like if the pace of space exploration keeps up.
Daniel loves writing (or so he claims), and he uses this skill to offer readers a "behind the scenes" look at the automotive industry. He also enjoys talking about space exploration and robots, because in his view the only way forward for humanity is away from this planet, in metal bodies. Full profile
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