On March 26, 2006, the first launch of SpaceX’s Falcon 1 rocket took off into the sky. The mission was a failure, with an explosion at T+33 seconds. This was followed by two more failures in 2007 and 2008. Since then however, save for one mission that had a secondary objective failure, SpaceX has had uninterrupted successes and moreover has been launching at a faster rate.

Below I’ve plotted the flight number (there have been 20 launches in all as of this writing) versus “Days since last launch” and you can clearly see how the time between launches has decreased. I thought to try this after noticing that another mission was due in just a few weeks and they’ve just launched the DSCOVR mission, and the data support my hunch.

In the graph I’ve plotted successful missions in green, failures in red, and the sole partial success in orangish-yellow. In terms of rocket used we have: