Two launches today by Rocket Lab and SpaceX
The launch pace continued today with two American commercial launches.
First Rocket Lab placed a Synspective radar satellite into orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This was the company’s eighth launch for Synspective, out of a 27-launch contract.
Next, SpaceX placed 25 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
36 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
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
The launch pace continued today with two American commercial launches.
First Rocket Lab placed a Synspective radar satellite into orbit, its Electron rocket lifting off from one of its two launchpads in New Zealand. This was the company’s eighth launch for Synspective, out of a 27-launch contract.
Next, SpaceX placed 25 more Starlink satellites in orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The first stage completed its fourth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
36 SpaceX
12 China
4 Rocket Lab
2 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
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
This was the 11th Falcon launch for March 2026 with 11 days still left in the month. SpaceX launched only 11 Falcons during the entire month of March last year. If the four additional Falcons now scheduled for March departures are actually launched, that will bring SpaceX’s 2026 Falcon launch total to 40, an annualized rate of 160. Last year it finished March with 36 Falcons launched, an annualized rate of 144. Even after the first quarter’s slow start, SpaceX managed to launch 165 Falcons for the entire year of 2025. So there seems a very decent chance that SpaceX may manage well over 165 Falcon launches for all of 2026.
April of 2025 saw 14 Falcons launched and brought the year-to-date total at that point to 50, an annualized rate of 150. If SpaceX manages to match March 2026’s probable total of 15 Falcons in April, that will be a year-to-date total of 55 and an annualized rate of 165 – equal to last year’s record. So not only is a new annual launch record looking likely, said record total may well be 180 or more.
And again, right now SpaceX is doing all this with only two launch pads!
Richard, what is amusing is that the pads are not the limiting factor. It is the time it takes to send an ASDS out to sea, wait for a booster to land, return, unload and head back out.
Vandenberg cheats a bit and drops the booster off a bit far away for a drive back to base. Whereas the Florida ASDS’s are much close. But roads are faster than the sea, so they can recycle faster and thus with one ASDS are really launching like crazy out on the West Coast.
Having 2 ASDS’s dedicated to SLC-40 launches, means you can see how sometimes it is just 2-3 day sbetween launches, which seems to be the real pad recycle time.
I was expecting them to do more RTLS for Starlink, with fewer satellites to get the launch rate up higher, but I guess they decided not to.
If you have 3 pads that can do 165 launches a year. That is basically one every 2.2 days across three pads.
If you had 3 pads that all did RTLS missions, and could recycle a pad in 3 days, then you could have 3 launches every 3 days which is 360+ launches a year. Would shorting the payload 5-10 Starlinks be worth it? I guess they decided the trade off was no.
It seems they have found a sweet spot.
I’d love to see seven sites on the East Coast, scattered.
America has never lost a launch site of any size—but that might change.
Jeff Wright,
I don’t know what would cause the US to lose a launch site other than enemy action. The US doesn’t have any enemies capable of projecting expeditionary military force across either the Atlantic or the Pacific. Since Pres. Trump’s little object lesson in Venezuela, the effective immobilization of Cuba and the expulsion of nearly all Russians and Chinese presences from Latin America, the Caribbean and the Gulf of America are also safe zones.
The only thing that could really take out a US spaceport would be a nuke. Any of the US’s rapidly dwindling list of remaining nuclear-armed enemies would have a lot of much higher-priority targets than spaceports.