SpaceX launches another 24 Starlink satellites
SpaceX this morning successfully launched 24 more Starlink satellites, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California.
The first stage completed its sixth flight (32 days after its previous flight), landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
62 SpaceX
29 China
8 Russia
7 Rocket Lab
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 62 to 52.
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With two more Starlink missions scheduled for Friday and Saturday, SpaceX should finish May with a YTD total of 64 launches, one of them a Starship stack. 63 Falcon launches in five months is a monthly average of 12.6. Should that average pace be maintained during the remaining seven months of 2026, the year-end Falcon launch total should be 151. The Starship launch total for 2026 should be in the 8 – 10 range for an all-up total of about 160.
I won’t make that a hard-and-fast prediction because SpaceX could well throttle back Falcon launches one-for-one, or even more, with Starship launches over the rest of the year.
While this isn’t shaping up to be a record year for SpaceX launches, it probably will be another record for launched mass. The total mass of the 20 Starlink V3 mass simulators plus the two “Dodger Dog” light and camera platforms launched as payload on Flight 12 was said to be ~45 tonnes. That suggests the 20 mass simulators massed at least 40 tonnes by themselves. SpaceX has been talking in terms of a full load-out of Starlink V3s as being 60 birds. If so, this suggests that the actual payload capability of Starship V3 stacks to low LEO could be 120 tonnes or perhaps even a bit more. So even one or two Starlink V3 deployment Starship missions during the remainder of the year would materially boost SpaceX’s launch mass total for 2026 vs. that for 2025.