SpaceX launches 29 Starlink satellites, uses 1st stage for record 35th time
SpaceX early this morning successfully launched another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force station in Florida.
The first stage (B1067) successfully completed its 35th flight (70 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic. This flight was a new record for the reuse of a Falcon 9 first stage, placing it only four behind the space shuttle Discovery in the rankings for the most reused launch vehicle:
39 Discovery space shuttle
35 Falcon 9 booster B1067
33 Atlantis space shuttle
33 Falcon 9 booster B1071
32 Falcon 9 booster B1063
31 Falcon 9 booster B1069
28 Columbia space shuttle
28 Falcon 9 booster B1077
28 Falcon 9 booster B1078
Expect these rankings to see some newer Falcon 9 first stages in the near future The older stages listed here seem to take about two months generally to turn-around after each launch. The younger stages are instead turning around much faster, in one month or less.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
68 SpaceX
34 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 68 to 59.
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Do you think Blue Origin will commission one or two for exclusive use to launch his Leo
“Lowest marginal-cost launch, ever.”
SpaceX is aiming for 40 reuses now, and I can’t wait to see B1067 reach it.
Richard M: SpaceX had said its was aiming for 40 reuses back when it first began flying these block 5 Falcon 9s, in about 2018 or so. It is only when I started listing the rankings that I realized that number might have been partly chosen expressly by Elon Musk to beat that space shuttle record.
Eric Berger made a great point about this achievement:
https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/06/a-falcon-9-booster-turns-five-years-old-and-just-set-a-remarkable-reuse-record/
You know, it’s not even like Atlas V or Delta IV are/were *bad* rockets. They are/were pretty effective for what they are/were. They were quite reliable. But this shows just how obsolescent Falcon 9 has made them.
Vulcan can probably be made just as reliable, before long. But it’s already just as obsolescent.
What you and Berger say makes me think of this: partial reuse allows for at least an order of magnitude more flights at a lower cost than expending them. Full reuse should allow for at least an order of magnitude more than that, if not two orders or more. I think a century from now, there won’t be a single expendable launch vehicle in operation, and people then will ask why we waited so long to shift to full reuse.
More like a decade or so from now. A century from now, expendable rocketry will seem as quaint as flapper dresses and cloche hats do to us now.
I think a century from now, there won’t be a single expendable launch vehicle in operation, and people then will ask why we waited so long to shift to full reuse.
They may ask because they forgot about the Space Shuttle and Buran. I can understand forgetting all about Buran, because the claim of its reusability will forever remain in doubt. We tried reusability a couple of decades after the start of the Space Age, but it didn’t work as well as expected and seemed to cost as much as the expendables, plus extra danger. the concept was proven, but the economics failed.
Another aborted attempt at reusability happened in the mid 1990s, with Delta Clipper and VentureStar single stage to orbit vehicles, with negative results on the proof of concept.
The attempts had gone so disastrously that even the Falcons were originally designed as expendable. It was Blue Origin that took another bold step to design New Shepard as a reusable booster and capsule, despite the evidence that this was not a productive use of resources. It was in the spirit of the Ansari X-Prize, and Blue Origin turned out to be correct. Reusability can be made to work effectively and efficiently, but it isn’t easy. Virgin Galactic learned that lesson, too, and they are about to restart operations with more robust flight vehicles.
Even now, with the wild success of SpaceX’s Falcons, many rocket scientists — and the MBA’s that fund them — are not yet enthusiastic about reusability.
So, yes, the future will have reason to think that those MBA’s and rocket scientists should have supported reusability with great enthusiasm, but we know the reason that they have hesitated.
Space is hard, and investors prefer the easy money over the harder endeavors. A hundred years from now it will look as easy as airliners look now, but today it is still difficult, dangerous, and expensive. Although the expense is decreasing, we are learning more about how to do it safely (lessons being learned the hard way with Starliner), and Starship is tackling the difficulty of the rocket equation.
Expendables may come back with autophage rockets…something that burns like a lit cigarette down to nothing as Tsander called for.
Low part count, perhaps pressure-feds could compete with a fully reusable LV
A question: if it takes two months to turn around an older F9 booster and something less than that for a newer F9 booster, what is the planned turn around for Super Heavy and SS? I’ve read elsewhere that Mr. Musk wants to be able to re-use these within days. Is that reasonable?
Steve White,
SpaceX has proposed a use of three times a day, which suggests a turnaround of eight hours for Super Heavy. The Starship orbiter would likely take longer for its turnaround, because it has to be loaded with its payload, a process that still takes days.
A tanker Starship may be able to turnaround in a similar eight-hour timeframe, because it can conceivably be loaded in the same way as regular propellant loading, and this could be an advantage for quickly getting plenty of propellants to the Mars fleets during the transit windows.
The idea has long been to make rockets as reusable and as maintainable as airliners. Keeping airliners moving means less money (and loans) tied up in a large fleet, more use from each vehicle, and less ground space needed for parking during layovers. A rapid turnaround like this is one of the several goals pursued by SpaceX on its Starship project.
Is it reasonable? I think it is reasonable, but whether the company can get the turnaround to be that short will be fun to watch. For one, it means the each pad will require thousands of tons of propellants supplied each day. Just one of the many challenges.