SpaceX launches 24 Starlink satellites
SpaceX tonight successfully placed another 24 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage (B1081) completed its 26th flight (37 days after its previous mission), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
92 SpaceX
50 China
10 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
10 Russia
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 92 to 85.
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That’s 90 Falcons in seven months, an annualized rate of 154 – 155. If we see monthly Starship launches for the rest of this year, ala Shotwell, the company launch total could be 161 – 162, pretty close to last year’s Falcon-only total. If that big Amazon deal I still smell comes through we might see a new record even for just Falcons. 2027 should see Starship ops get well into two figures.
Dick Eagleson wrote about “”90 Falcons in seven months……””
Some of those are the “Rideshare Transporter” missions. One of the Rideshare launches had 140 satellites! If one were to go back and count every deployed small sat as a launch, oh, my!
Also, just imagine a Rideshare mission with the mighty Starship!
Imagination may be all we get. One Starship should be able to launch so many smallsats that it could take years to accumulate the payloads for one launch. What smallsat company wants to wait that long for a launch. I suspect that Starship will not be in the smallsat rideshare business, but it may be in the large satellite rideshare business.
I suspect that SpaceX is willing to relinquish the smallsat rideshare flights to other companies, such as Rocket Lab with their Neutron launch vehicle and Stoke Space with their Nova.
That’s an interesting point – what happens to smallsats when SpaceX lops another zero (or more) off the cost to orbit per pound? Proliferation of smallsats is one direction. Growth of smallsats into disposable medium sats would be another. Should be a fun ride however it goes. Cheers –
Discussion of all metal, fluffy designs;
https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=50748.msg2810783#msg2810783
Carmack is talking something like Dragon (Big Onion) but a wide saucer may be best:
http://www.astronautix.com/b/bonosaucer.html
The reason I mention that is that the aft boat-tail there lends itself to a linear aerospike with two vertical stabilizers for added bracing.
The concept of vacuum-filled balloons has intrigued me. If materials technology continues to advance, might a vacuum-filled even need landing burns or chopsticks?
At Venus, a HAVOK airship filled with Earth sea-level air is such that the envelope itself is the gondola.
Might a saucer shaped ship—completely evacuated to vacuum, float in the air here as Starship 40/IFT-13 currently floats in the ocean?
In terms of towing….anything towed may feel nose-under pull.
I wonder if anyone has towed a line of floats at a right-angle directly in front of another object hoping for it to ride up and over…
Floats to either side of Starship could nestle under fore and aft fins, then be inflated more fully….this done at low speed such that slipstream to either side of Starship could hold the two lines of floats along side.
We saw the problem with wrangling the Artemis II capsule…though the first recovery just backed a ship over Artemis I and drained the water.
Time to brainstorm