Sunday, April 30 at 8:26 p.m. ET, Falcon Heavy launched the ViaSat-3 Americas mission, delivering the ViaSat-3 Americas, Astranis’s first MicroGEO satellite, and Gravity Space’s GS-1 satellite to a geostationary orbit from Launch Complex 39A (LC-39A) at Kennedy Space Center in Florida. One of the side boosters on this mission previously supported Arabsat-6A, STP-2, COSMO-SkyMed Second Generation FM2, KPLO, and three Starlink missions, and the second previously supported launch of Arabsat-6A and STP-2.
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So, viasat-3 will be able to stay on station much longer with the same launched reaction mass, assuming viasat-3 does not fail, or become obsolescent before it’s reaction mass runs out. SpaceX must have a lot of falcon-9 boosters to make them a deal cheap enough to throw away three of them.
That’s great. SpaceX must have driven the cost of F-9 boosters well along to that of a mature technology, that of materials, and relatively cheap mass manufacturing technologies.
Falcon-9 will be a cash cow until starship is human rated, and somewhat beyond that.
SpaceX uses end of life boosters on missions like this, so it’s not like they aren’t planning on throwing them away. They likely wouldn’t do this with a new booster.