Hi, it's me, Tim Dodd, the Everyday Astronaut. At the beginning of 2022.
I ran a poll on Twitter and on SurveyMonkey in case you don't have Twitter,
asking those of us that are spaceflight enthusiasts to make our best predictions
about what we expect to see in the upcoming year. And believe it or not,
we actually, we did pretty good,
but we were definitely pretty optimistic about a few things. So just for fun,
we're gonna do a little overview on what did and didn't happen throughout this
last year and take a look and see how we did in the polls.
Now this is actually different from our Astro Awards.
The Astro Awards are the thing where we kind of celebrate all the cool things
that happened. Get ready,
there will be the Astro Awards still at the beginning of the year.
And we're also almost done with my over one hour long deep dive on how
to start a rocket engine. So stay tuned. There's a lot more.
So for those of you who caught last year's poll, uh,
I've got a link to that below so you can play along and see how you actually
did.
But I also have a link to this upcoming 2023 years polls for both Twitter and
SurveyMonkey. That being said, uh, let's get
started.
Okay, first off,
I asked you guys which of these three rockets will launch first between SLS,
Starship going Orbital and Vulcan.
And then we also had a none of the above and this one was a pretty big upset for
the 70.5% of you guys that guessed that Starship would actually be the first one
to go orbital, as we know, it hasn't gone orbital yet, hasn't left the pad,
and only, uh, 24.5% of you guessed this one, right, that SLS would fly first.
So as we know, SLS took the cake on November 16th,
2022 with a spectacular night launch for Artemis 1.
It was amazing. Now have to admit,
I personally didn't imagine it was going to take until November to see one of
these three rockets fly. And frankly,
I kind of thought we'd see all three of them fly.
So congrats to those of you that guess that Artemis would fly first. Next up,
I asked how many times did we see the Falcon Heavy Launch and uh,
only 24.2% of you guys actually got this one right guessing that only
one or two would fly. As it turns out,
there is only one Falcon Heavy launch this year on November 1st,
2022 for USSF 44.
And this was another flawless Falcon Heavy launch with that incredible dual
booster landing. And it even had an expended center core,
which helped the Rocket loft, the satellites direct to a geotationary orbit.
Had it not been like the foggiest day I've ever seen at Cape Canaveral,
this would've easily been one of my favorite launches this year.
But unfortunately we didn't really get to see much. Absolutely insane. SpaceX,
how do you do it? And why'd you do it on a foggy day?
Couldn't you have gone one more day later?
Next up was what's the furthest milestone that Boeing Starliner spacecraft will
make it to this year? And for this 1 52.6% of you guys
actually got this one correct that Boeing would do their second orbital flight
test.
It was the second uncrewed mission of the star liner since the first uncrewed
test was not successful in completing all all of its milestones after it ended
up having a handful of problems that plagued the mission after a successful
mission with o ft two,
Boeing is now eyeing their crewed flight test no earlier than April, 2023.
So what do you guys think?
This is definitely one that's in the polls for next year.
When do you think we'll see people fly on star liner? Next up, we had a fun one.
I asked you guys,
will Rocket Lab successfully catch recover and relaunch an Electron this
year? And now I, I have to say when I made this poll, I kind of, in retrospect,
I thought it was silly that I even said that they'll almost catch one. Like,
what's that? What's that even mean? Uh,
but come to find out that's pretty much exactly what happened this year.
So 19.7% of you got it right? But in a way,
59.5% of you,
which was the majority kind of got it right because technically they caught it,
they let it go and then they did recover it still.
But that's not really what we meant, you know,
we really meant like catch it and never have it touch the water and recovering.
At least that's what I intended to mean.
So I'd say the 19.7% of you guys got this one right, will they catch,
recover and ref fly one next year?
Hope you guys are voting because this is definitely going to be one we're
keeping an eye on. Next up,
we had how many new launch vehicles will we have in 2022?
Holy crap, if you actually count up how many brand new rockets,
how many new rockets that were kind of versions of older rockets,
but technically new rockets,
we had a lot. We have Firefly's Alpha, SLS, Vega-C, Jielong-3, ZK-1A,
Long March 6A and Angara 1.2
all who successfully made it to orbit, that's absolutely unbelievable.
But if we're talking about completely clean slate,
rocket designs like ground up, it does get a little bit more complicated.
Anyway, you cut it.
We're still pretty close to having about five brand new rockets fly this year
and only 4.8% of us actually got that one right? I I wasn't one of them.
Uh, so congratulations to those 4.8%.
The majority of us thought only one or two new rockets would fly in 2022.
I think 2023 is going to be even crazier. Okay, so the next one is funny.
We asked what's the furthest milestone we'll see a super heavy booster do
in 2022? Yeah, I don't think many of us saw this one coming.
Unfortunately,
I think we got spoiled by the progress and the pace we saw in 2021 and we just
really couldn't even imagine the world where frankly nothing would happen uh,
this year. So yeah, this one was a bit of a upset for most of us.
So unfortunately 88.3% of us just couldn't really imagine we wouldn't
see much happen at Starbase this year.
And only 0.5% of you guys were pessimistic enough to think that nothing would
happen at Starbase. Now I don't think nothing happened at Star Base.
It really should be more like none of the above,
but hopefully we see a lot more action at Starbase in 2023. Okay,
so this one's obviously a throwaway.
The question is assuming Starship slash super heavy launches,
how far will super heavy make it into orbit? And then I explicitly said,
don't answer this if, if you don't think it'll launch in 2022.
So as we know now, anyone that answered that question got it wrong.
And again,
I think I need to do a little bit better job here of making polls because I also
asked you guys what's the furthest milestone we'll see of a Starship upper stage
this year and yeah, uh,
1.6% of you guess correctly that no milestone would be reached. Next up we
asked you guys which of these three small sat rocket companies would make it to
Orbit first this year, including ABL, Relativity and Firefly.
And only one of those companies actually made it off the pad this year and that
was Firefly with their Alpha rocket,
which launched successfully on October 1st, 2022. Unfortunately,
ABL and Relativity didn't get off the pad this year,
but both companies are poised to launch in early 2023 with vehicles on the pad
and with ABL having already had a handful of launch attempts,
but unfortunately all of them have been scrubbed so far.
So the majority of you guys actually got this one right with 68.4% of you
guessing it was going to be Firefly. Uh, I absolutely love that launch.
Obviously I was heavily involved with the production of that launch,
so it's pretty close to my heart. They will definitely be getting an Astro award
this year. Next step,
I asked you how many humans would go into orbit in 2022 and we actually saw a
minor downtick compared to 2021 with only 24
people making it into orbit this year.
Now there isn't any real particular reason for this. You know,
half of it just kind of comes down to scheduling,
but it turns out that 22.6% of you guys actually got this one right next up.
We asked almost a bit of a trick question,
but really it's plain and simple how many Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Boosters
will land this year?
So this really wasn't meant to be like a gauge of how good is SpaceX at landing
rockets,
but it's really meant to be more how many missions this year would be expendable
In 2022,
SpaceX only expended three of them. So they had a 100% mission success and
100% landing success, which is absolutely astonishing.
This means that 95% of the boosters SpaceX launched in 2022 were landed,
which only 30% of you voted for 60.5% of us thought we'd
see over 96%.
Now I do have to say it was pretty cool seeing them retire some boosters by just
expending them. Uh,
but it's just absolutely incredible that they had a 100% landing success rate.
Staying with the Falcon 9 and launching with SpaceX,
we asked how many times will SpaceX launch something in 2022?
Wow, , okay, uh,
I think Elon at the end of 2021 said something like they expect to,
they're hoping to launch 50 times in 2022.
And I definitely thought that was just a completely optimistic goal. So yeah,
I only put 41 plus as like the top number.
I couldn't even imagine a world where we'd see over 60 launches or over 40 even
this year, frankly. Uh, so the majority of us got it wrong because we,
we guess that there'd be between 38 and 40 launches,
but 30.5% of you guys got this one right,
by guessing they'd launch over 41 times,
which just is, yeah, still crazy,
but I doubt that many of you out there would've ever imagined they were going to
launch 60 times this year.
And the next one again is also about the Falcon 9 and SpaceX.
We asked what's the most flights that a single Falcon nine booster will reach in
2022? So at the end of 2021,
we had booster 1051 hit 11 launches on a single booster,
but by the end of this year we had three boosters reach 14 flights
and we had one booster.
It was B1058 that reached a 15th launch.
So the majority of us were pretty close.
There was 64.8% of us that think they'd get to 14 launches,
but 24.3% of you got this one right thinking that they'd actually get above
that. Next up I asked if you guys thought that Rocket Lab would test fire their
Archimedes engine this year for this one. Yeah,
68.3% of US thought they would and 31.7% of us
said no. So unfortunately, as far as we know,
they had did not end up test firing an Archimedes engine in 2022. Now,
although we didn't see one of those engines fired,
we did get to see a little glimpse of the bulkhead for Neutron,
which is kind of the section at the top of the tanks and a picture of that
compared to an electron bulkhead that was super awesome in my opinion.
It's really fun to start seeing some of this Neutron hardware appear. Next up,
we tried to predict one S SLS slash you know,
the Artemis one launch would actually happen and believe it or not,
the majority got this one right with 46.5% of you thinking that it would
launched in the second half of the year. That's fantastic. Frankly,
I didn't care when it launched.
I'm just so happy it finally launched and it was amazing. Next up,
we try to guess how much further would ingenuity fly on Mars? And you know,
this one was incredible because in 2021 it already far exceeded all expectations
and all milestones.
And coming to find out is kind of just getting started in 2022,
it went on to fly 19 more times for a current total of 37 flights
and a total of 7.58 kilometers traveled on Mars.
This means it flew 3.76 kilometers in 2022 with its longest flight
being a whopping 704 meters.
But it didn't quite reach that third option that we had in our poll.
This means that 47.3% of you guys actually got this one right.
This next one is probably the dumbest question I had on the entire poll last
year because I asked you guys,
when do we expect to see the first images from the James Webb Space telescope?
Now the reason this is dumb is because NASA literally told us before I even made
this poll when we should expect to see the first images,
like there was no chance of it happening before they said it was going to
happen. So I don't know wh why this was even a question. Honestly,
the James Webb Space Telescope had a very precise deployment in alignment
sequence that was down to the day, it was down,
down to the hour and I guess it was down to the minute.
So it really shouldn't have been any shock that NASA released the first full
images on July 11th,
2022 in live Stream featuring many of the scientists involved in the mission.
Next up we asked when will we see a Raptor two engine installed on a vehicle?
And the first time we actually saw an engine on installed on a vehicle was in
May of 2022. The first time we actually saw them fire an engine on Starship
wouldn't be until August of 2022. So again,
the majority at 36.5% of you got this one right and guessing when they're going
to install a Raptor 2 on a vehicle not bad.
Next up we asked what's the furthest milestone we expect to see for ULA's Vulcan
rocket? And for this one,
43% of you got this one right guessing that they would actually get their BE4
engines delivered.
But although both engines were successfully delivered to ULA this year,
unfortunately the rocket hasn't left Decatur as a whole yet.
Now Sands any major issue, we should for sure see Vulcan fly in 2023. Next up,
we asked how many lunar landers we expected to see land on the moon this year in
2022, 34.7% of us thought we'd see two lunar landers this
year. And unfortunately we saw zero. So 24.7% of us got this one right,
predicting that we wouldn't see anything successfully land on the moon in 2022.
But there's already a couple of spacecraft on their way to the moon as we speak.
They're hoping to successfully land in early 2023.
So hopefully there's a higher number in 2023.
Next we had another new rocket prediction asking what's the furthest milestone
we'll see for Arianespaces's upcoming Ariane 6 Rocket. And again,
the majority was actually wrong here with 42.4% expecting to see
a test of the Ariane6 at the pad in 2022.
It turns out the rocket has not been shipped to the pad yet.
So unfortunately only 20.4% of you got this one right with " no visible
progress". Now I have to admit,
no visible progress is a little bit harsh way of putting it since there
definitely was progress this year, but since it hasn't, you know,
made it out the door yet, unfortunately none of it has really been visible. Now,
on the same note we asked you,
what's the furthest milestone Blue Origin will complete with their New Glenn
rocket?
And here you were all pretty sure we wouldn't really see any visible progress
similar to the Arian six, which is more or less what happened.
So congratulations to the 54.2% of you who didn't think we'd really see
anything happen. Unfortunately, yeah that's the case, but I'm really,
really hoping we actually start seeing some hardware head out to the pad here
soon. Boy oh boy to this next one, have a pretty major wrench thrown in it.
When I asked how many times will a Soyuz rocket launch in 2022.
But I personally didn't predict that Russia was going to invade Ukraine,
but I guess everyone else kind of saw the writing on the wall that the trends in
Soyer's launches was going down more or less.
Now Soyuz would've launched a lot more if they would've actually been able to
keep those OneWeb launches, but they lost out on that. So yeah,
it turns out that 44.8% of you guess correctly that it would actually decline
with a total of 19 launches in 2022. Lastly,
we asked you what you thought would happen with NASA's double asteroid
redirection test or DART mission.
You guys nailed this one just like NASA did because 86.6% of you
guessed correctly that would hit its target Dimorphus,
which it did successfully do on September 26th.
And we have Impact ,
a giant Leap for Humanity in the name of planetary defense. Woo.
This was a home run mission for sure and we're definitely gonna be talking a lot
about it in this year's Astro Awards overall.
Some crazy stuff happened in 2022 and we're gonna dive a lot more into that
stuff in the Astro Awards in just a little bit here. So stay tuned, uh,
cause we'll dive you even deeper into what did happen, all the fun things,
but we'll also celebrate those who made it happen. And another reminder,
if you wanna take part in next year's video, check the links below.
We've got some polls there for you.
You can please just take one between either the Twitter poll or the Survey
Monkey Poll. Uh, and next year you can play along and see how you did.
I owe a really big thank you to our Patreon supporters for helping with this
actual video, doing a lot of fun little things here with me, uh,
but also for just helping with everything we do here at Everyday Astronaut. If
you wanna support the work that I do,
head on over to patreon.com/everydayastronaut, you know, while you're online,
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soon we'll have a restock of our Falcon 9 Model Rockets and lots of other fun
stuff at everydayastronaut.com/shop. And like I said, be sure and stick around.
There's not only the Astro Awards coming out,
there's also going to be how to start a Rocket Engine coming up soon.
I've also got an exclusive tour with Stoke Aerospace and their incredible fully
reusable launch vehicle they're working on lots of fun stuff.
We're gonna be ramping up here into Starship action hopefully soon.
So stay tuned. There's a ton more coming. Thanks everybody.
That's gonna do it for me. I'm Tim dod,
the everyday astronaut bringing space down to earth for everyday people.