SpaceX: the droneship Just Read the Instructions has recovered the latest Falcon 9, it will be dedicated to the transportation of Starship
The Falcon 9 rockets from SpaceX are among the most reliable launch vehicles available on the market and, in general, in the history of the aerospace industry. Their capabilities, combined with the high launch cadence related to the reusability of the first stage and the production capabilities of the second stage by the American company, have led to a radical change in the industry. Now there has been an important development, but it concerns not the launch vehicle itself but rather the supporting hardware, specifically the droneship Just Read the Instructions (JRTI).
At 8:53 AM today (Italian time), a Falcon 9 rocket successfully launched into orbit the GPS III-8 satellite, taking off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 40 (SLC-40) in Florida. The launch was successful, and the first stage, which had previously flown six other times (for Starlink missions), landed correctly on the droneship Just Read the Instructions.
At the end of the mission, SpaceX announced that "after 156 successful landings of a Falcon 9, Just Read the Instructions will now be fully dedicated to supporting Starship operations from now on." In total, there have been 159 landing attempts, but not all were completed successfully (over 98% success rate).
It's also worth noting that there was a previous version of the droneship with the same name (version 1) that was used for only two missions with failed landings and was eventually replaced in 2015. Initially, the droneship Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) was employed on the Pacific coast to support launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base before being moved to the Atlantic coast for missions from the Space Coast. Regarding Falcon 9, not all first stages are recovered, and not all use droneships for landing; some also land on Landing Zones on land.
Kiko Dontchev (Vice President of Launches at SpaceX) stated, "With 39A (the KSC launch pad) becoming primarily a site for Falcon Heavy and Starship, we actually don’t need two operational droneships on the East Coast to maintain our Falcon rocket launch manifest. Think of launch sites/droneships like landing runways, where you need one landing runway for each takeoff runway (ideally, they are the same runway, i.e., Starship). ASOG can support a 4-day launch cycle with RTLS missions in parallel. That’s exactly how we operate on the West Coast! JRTI will join the transport barge - you’ll thank me later - to support the transportation of Starship and Super Heavy from Starbase to Cape Canaveral. We have a plan for any Falcon Heavy mission with a dual return."
As mentioned above, the droneship Just Read the Instructions (JRTI) will now be employed for Starship. The new fully reusable vehicle from SpaceX will not land on this droneship but will instead be used to transport the second stage from the Starbase facilities (Boca Chica, Texas) to the Kennedy Space Center, where another production center is rising and where a new launch tower, Mechazilla, will be present (another is being built at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station).