SpaceX launches more Starlink satellites
SpaceX last night successfully placed another 24 Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage (B1097) completed its 12th flight (43 days after its previous mission), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
This was also SpaceX’s 100th launch in 2026, which set no records, but highlights the company’s remarkable success. For most of the history of space exploration, only the Soviet Union was ever able to do that many launches in a single year, and it only did that because it kept launching cheap, throw-away, short term reconnaissance satellites that were less effective than the long term more sophisticated satellites the U.S. military adopted. The U.S. only managed to reach the century mark in 2023, and that was solely because SpaceX completed 96 launches that year. Since then SpaceX has topped hundred launches each year, and by a lot.
Though it remains unclear if the company will continue this pace when Starship becomes operational, the count is not likely to go down by much, as other rocket companies are on the horizon and will soon begin ramping up operations. The demand is high for getting payloads in orbit, and it appears it will only grow higher in the coming years.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
100 SpaceX
55 China
11 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
10 Russia
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 100 to 92.
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.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
We might reach a point where it will be desirable to calculate a leader board based on the much-more-difficult metrics of tonnage and volume. I imagine the calculations would be very difficult to make with any accuracy, given the reporting that is provided by the various entities that conduct launches.
F,
You may appreciate this page of the BryceTech site.
I’m not sure anyone tracks volume to orbit, and I’m not sure how to measure that anyway, because there can be open spaces aboard satellites and other probes.
I believe this launch put Starlink over the 11,000 satellite threshold. Which is pretty amazing, if you think about it.
Yes. And barely a tithe of what SpaceX now intends for the future. SpaceX wishes to expand Starlink to 100,000 birds and to carry half or more of all Internet traffic worldwide. I think it has a very good shot at accomplishing both.
And even Starlink and Starlink Mobile pale in comparison to the plans for a million-sat Starmind constellation. All of which, in turn, is merely a warming-up exercise for the Kardashev-significant plans Elon has for space-deployed AI manufactured on the Moon.
Terrestrially, of course, there will be Terafab and the Pecan Island Starship facility and much else besides.
We are barely into the next great age of human accomplishment. The next few years will be jaw-droppingly impressive. The ones beyond that, still more so. I hope I am destined to last long enough to see at least some of it come to pass.
Be careful what you wish for.
Every big technological advance throughout history has been a mix of good versus bad.
The jury is still out on balance for some of them.
AI is shaping up to be the biggest Faustian bargain of them all.
We are fast approaching the event horizon and most people sound like Scotty–“we need more power, Captain”
The good has consistently outweighed the bad because the bad tends to be temporary and transitional and the good tends to get baked in long-term.
Dick Eagleson,
“We are barely into the next great age of human accomplishment. The next few years will be jaw-droppingly impressive. The ones beyond that, still more so. I hope I am destined to last long enough to see at least some of it come to pass.”
A decade ago, I had expected the 2020s to be an exciting time, but I thought it would be in manned space. Bigelow promised space stations and commercial manned spacecraft were coming along to man them. Although manned space has not done what I wanted, unmanned space is coming along just fine. In fact, there is a lack of sufficient launch capability to get the job done, but that makes the potential that much more exciting, because as much as is being done today, people want to do even more next year.
Throughout history, people have been concerned about big technological advances, fearing that the drawbacks would outweigh the benefits. Few technologies have had this problem. The atomic bomb is an example of an exception, because we have not yet used it for a peaceful purpose; although we could argue that the only military use had saved millions of lives that would have been lost during the invasion it prevented. AI is not even smart enough to not help students cheat on term papers, so it isn’t intelligent, which means it isn’t artificial, either; it is just another form of search engine but with a fancy, exciting name.