SpaceX completes 3rd launch today
SpaceX tonight successfully launched a classified payload for the National Reconnaissance Office, its Falcon Heavy rocket lifting off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The rocket’s two side boosters (B1104 and B1072) completed their 2nd and 4th missions, 33 days after their previous Falcon Heavy launch, placing the Roman Space Telescope in orbit. Both boosters touched down softly at SpaceX’s two landing zones at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. The two fairings completed their 4th and 5th flights respectively.
This was the company’s third launch today, using three different launchpads, two in Florida and one in California.
The leader board for the 2026 launch race:
114 SpaceX
60 China
16 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
12 Russia
SpaceX now leads the entire world combined 114 to 112 in successful launches in 2026.
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Please add a category for payload weight to space. Spacex is beginning a new era in space with Starship delivering 100 + tons per flight.
On that note, SpaceX recently passed Soviet Union/Russia in total aggregate upmass to orbit. Which is no mean feat – that includes a bunch of space stations.
Who is tracking aggregate mass to orbit? Would like to see that site.
Also note, 3 launches, from three pads, and 4 landings on 4 pads in just over 12 hours. And 4 launches from 4 pads in just about 4 days. All pads (launch and landing) were used.
Very impressive.
Three launches from three different pads in one day is impressive enough, but recovering both Falcon Heavy side boosters just 33 days after their previous mission really shows how far SpaceX has pushed launch cadence and hardware reuse.
So, SpaceX launched five missions in the last six days.
• Sep 26 — USSF-385, Falcon 9
• Sep 28 — Starship Flight 14
• Oct 1 — Crew-13, Falcon 9
• Oct 1 — Transporter-18, Falcon 9
• Oct 1 — NROL-97, Falcon Heavy
Three of them launched in less than 13 hours.
And yet, people still doubt SpaceX’s eventual capability to launch Starship at a high cadence.
To steelman their position, I suspect they would argue that SpaceX can’t because of inherent flaws in Starship, and that SpaceX will run out of money before they can fix said flaws. That Raptor will never become reliable enough for daily flights, the heat shield is too heavy and won’t be able to be reused, that the landing maneuvers will cause too much stress on the vehicle. Things like that.
All that said, all of the above seems based on wishful thinking, and ignorance, whether benign or malign. SpaceX already has yearly revenues of over $30 billion, and that’s before more signed AI deals kick in, before they expand Starlink and Starshield further, it assumes Starmind will go nowhere, that Starfall won’t make money, that external customers for Starship won’t appear. They have a few hits, but lots of misses, and it often seems like most naysayers still operate in a world where SpaceX never built a new pad, isn’t expanding to Florida or Louisiana, that their tiles are made and applied just like the Shuttle’s, that there are no factories building Starship components, and on and on. Except when they feel they can gain a rhetorical advantage, then they admit there are ongoing changes.
It just all comes off as ultimately bad-faith partisanship that wouldn’t happen if Musk still supported the Democrats. Or in some cases, if the SLS didn’t get criticized. Both groups give off strong whiffs of entitlement.
I can’t disagree with any of that, Nate.
The arguments might have a little more heft if Starship had never launched, let alone, launched to orbit yet.
It will take Elon longer than he hopes or has promised (aspirationally) to get to that high cadence. But it’s very reasonable to believe it *will* happen. Even in my most realistic mood, I now think at least a weekly launch cadence is possible and even probable by the end of 2027.
Killing off Falcon and Starship underperforming later is always a possibility
Be more specific, please. How will Starship underperform, in your vision? Mass to orbit? Flight rate? Cost per pound? Reuses per flight article? What do you think of as insuperable obstacles? Such objections will be fortified if you have specific, cogent reasons versus it simply being fear-based.
“And yet, people still doubt SpaceX’s eventual capability to launch Starship at a high cadence.”
I can understand the doubt, thinking that high cadence is unlikely. After all, no one has done it before, so the wonder is how it can be done. Launching the same booster twice in a week is clearly impossible, much less trying to launch it twice in the same day. You’d have to be an airliner, or something, to turn around that quickly.
I have some difficulty understanding the doubt about high cadence (isn’t that the exact opposite of my previous paragraph?). Launching the same booster a second time was once considered impossible, yet here we are. Falcon was not designed for a particularly high cadence, and yet there it is, launching at a previously unbelievably high rate (as though anyone believed a booster could even launch twice). Starship is intentionally being designed for an extremely high cadence, especially the heat shield, in which lessons learned from the Space Shuttle are being incorporated at great effort and expense. SpaceX has thrown a lot of heat shield ideas onto the wall and has learned what literally sticks.
Lessons learned from the RS-25 Shuttle main engine are also being incorporated. Multiple flights of several versions of both Ship and Super Heavy have produced lessons that have been incorporated. Unlike most rockets designed these days, Starship has not been developed as a one-and-done design.
Run out of money before they can fix flaws? They just raised tens of billions of dollars in an IPO; they can afford to design a new Starship from scratch and make it work, just to fix the flaws. — And isn’t that essentially what they do with each new version? — Don’t they design a new version from scratch, incorporating their lessons learned, correcting errors and flaws, and adding new capabilities?
The development of Starship included the testing of many previously-believed rules of thumb, sometimes showing that these rules were overzealous, and sometimes showing that they had merit. I’m still reeling over the reality that they stored flight hardware outdoors and assembled flight units in open-air hangars rather than environmentally controlled interior spaces (especially thermal control, so that parts did not undergo differential expansion and mis-fit at the time of welding) with dust and debris control, then most of those rockets didn’t blow up, at least not during flight. Those that did blow up were for reasons other than outdoor storage or assembly.
They be crazy at that company, yet they still succeed. I don’t bet against SpaceX.
If the Democrats win control of Congress, their priority will be to prevent TeslaSpaceX from hosting the internet from space directly to personal devices – too socially dangerous, with insufficient opportunities for political graft.
Then I’m sure they will offer free Mandarin lessons for us all, as it becomes the standard worldwide language.
I’m sure they would LIKE to do that – there are live proposals now to nationalize SpaceX in toto! – but they won’t get past either the Senate filibuster, or Trump’s veto pen.