What percentage of Falcon 9/Heavy boosters will RTLS in 2024?
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Ṁ126
Dec 31
35%
chance

This question resolves to the percentage of SpaceX Falcon booster flights that land on a ground-pad in 2024

The landing must be successful, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches are counted, and Falcon Heavy Launches count each of the three boosters independently.

For comparison, 2023 saw 21 successful ground-pad landings, 78 successful drone-ship landings, and 7 boosters were intentionally expended; and hence an identical question for 2023 would have resolved 21/(21+78+7) = 20%

Other minor clarifications:
A landing is considered successful if it is listed as such on the List of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches Wikipedia page
UTC is used to determine the start and end of 2024
RTLS (return to launch site) is used in the title for brevity because as far as I'm aware all Falcon ground-pad landings are RTLS but if somehow a booster lands on a ground pad at a different location to the launch site, it will still be counted.

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So far in 2024, 29% of Falcon launches have had return to launch site landings; higher than the 20% of 2023 but lower than the 35% currently predicted, will the percentage continue to increase?

Some possibly relevant info:

@Nat And:

"Lands on a ground pad" are boat landing excluded for some reason?

@ProjectVictory Yep! The reason why I think this is an interesting and potentially relevant question (I wasn't sure whether to include this in the description or not) is that last year the drone-ships were incredibly busy trying to keep up with all the boosters - and this year SpaceX are targeting 50% more launches. So it begs the question: can the drone-ships facilitate 50% more landings, or if not, how do SpaceX plan to achieve so many launches? There have been a few suggestions thrown around and it'll likely be a couple of factors, but the one this question is asking about is if SpaceX will target more RTLS landings (because every RTLS is a landing that a drone-ship isn't needed for).

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