SpaceX launches 24 more Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully launched another 24 Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage (B1088) completed its 17th flight (25 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
77 SpaceX
41 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
8 Russia
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 77 to 71.
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It’s always worth remembering how dominant China would be (I recall in the years before SpaceX’s flight rate really shot up all the predictions that the Chinese would become the premier space power) without SpaceX on the scene. We wouldn’t be third, but we’d be a distant second. I believe all US non-SpaceX launches to date this year are about a dozen.
So far the U.S. has launched 17 times, excluding SpaceX, and that includes Artemis-2.
In real life, making SpaceX vanish wouldn’t mean the U.S. only did 17 launches. The needs and demands of the satellite industry and the military would have forced others to come forward and fill those needs and demands. The numbers however would be far below SpaceX’s. In this fantasy, the U.S. would probably have about 20 to 25 launches now, at most.
It would be interesting to see a second “leaderboard” regarding SpaceX launches of NON-SpaceX cargo.
”In this fantasy, the U.S. would probably have about 20 to 25 launches now, at most.”
Probably a bit more than that: 30-40 launches in the first half of the year. 15-20 each for ULA and Rocket Lab and handful of others for Northrop Grumman.
That assumes that there is no Starlink / Starshield equivalent and thus no demand for a reusable launch vehicle.
Mmmmmm… I don’t think so. ULA never did double digits semi-annually even when Delta 2 was still in service. Its goal with Vulcan is 2/mo. – 24/yr – which is nowhere near in sight at this point. So at most 12 per half-annum when, and if, it gets there. Rocket Lab may get to 15 – 20 semi-annually at some point, but it hasn’t yet, seems unlikely to do so next year and the launches would be mostly Electrons anyway. NorGrum would be grounded other than the very occasional Minotaur and would have been so for almost three years now.
Absent SpaceX, Falcon 9 and the Dragons – along with the grounding of Cygnus – we would have, in effect, ceded the ISS to Russia. We’d still be paying through the nose for both crew and cargo logistics.
Add in a few Delta IVs – which would not have retired – and we might be seeing 30 – 40 US launches annually, but certainly not semi-annually.
There would be no reusable boosters as the entire legacy aerospace establishment heaped scorn and derision on the idea and there is zero probability any of the legacy primes would be doing even paper studies of the concept.
It occurs to me that I’m probably being over-generous here by even assuming Rocket Lab would exist if SpaceX did not. Maybe Orbital would have done Cygnus and Antares anyway, but there’s room for doubt there too. More likely, NASA would have had to rely on more throw-away rockets and spacecraft from The Usual Suspects to get cargo and people to and from the ISS. We might have seen some sort of cargo/downmass solution by now but we could just as easily still be waiting on that too, just as with crew. I think the checkered history of Starliner shows about how well the legacy primes would have failed to handle that little problem. Just add some other over-budget, under-performing mess from LockMart or NorGrum. There was talk at one point about using Orion as an ISS crew-delivery vehicle, though it would have to have been launched on something a lot cheaper than SLS and a lot more compatible with human biology than the absurd “Corndog.”
Any way you slice it, US spaceflight – human and otherwise – would be a thoroughgoing clownshow at this point had SpaceX not come along when it did.
I thought a lot of this individual:
https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/2014/03/11/rocket-engineer-ed-hujsak-of-la-jolla-launches-several-careers-throughout-his-lifetime/
He thought savings on LVs could be had—but lacked the financial clout to institute them.
Same with Truax—but he was a NAVY man, and so had an even harder time of it than Medaris.
As in sports, there are intangibles…
I remember hearing about unrelated people showing up at the patent office within hours of each other—both with the same idea.
That always intrigued me…how certain periods of time allow for one thing, and not another.
That should be what sociologists should investigate, instead of talking about how wicked and “linear”space aficionados are.
“That always intrigued me…how certain periods of time allow for one thing, and not another.”
Nothing in this Universe is evenly distributed. There are interplays and complexities, but Human priorities, often those biologically driven, will tend to shape the perceived experience. The steam engine languished for some 1600 years before it was exploited. It is interesting how various Human endeavors lurch along, but perhaps not especially mysterious.