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.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
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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.