SpaceX launches 29 more Starlink satellites
The beat goes on: Even as everyone (including myself) was focused on NASA’s Artemis-2 lunar mission, SpaceX remained centered on its own space effort. This evening it placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The first stage completed its 15th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic only 23 days after its previous flight.
Below is the leader board for the 2026 launch race, which I had forgotten to include in the previous two launches by SpaceX and NASA. Those posts have now been updated to include it.
41 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
3 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer was also scheduled today to do the first demo launch of its Tianlong-3 orbital rocket, which appears in many ways to be a Falcon 9 copy. At this moment there are no reports out of China of what happened, though Jonathan McDowell reports on X of speculation that it was a failure. We will know more in a day or so.
Space Pioneer is the pseudo-company that in 2024 had this rocket’s first stage do an unplanned launch during a static fire engine test. That incident delayed this launch attempt by at least one year.
The beat goes on: Even as everyone (including myself) was focused on NASA’s Artemis-2 lunar mission, SpaceX remained centered on its own space effort. This evening it placed another 29 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
The first stage completed its 15th flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic only 23 days after its previous flight.
Below is the leader board for the 2026 launch race, which I had forgotten to include in the previous two launches by SpaceX and NASA. Those posts have now been updated to include it.
41 SpaceX
16 China
5 Rocket Lab
3 Russia
SpaceX continues to lead the entire world combined in total launches, as it did in both ’24 and ’25.
Chinese pseudo-company Space Pioneer was also scheduled today to do the first demo launch of its Tianlong-3 orbital rocket, which appears in many ways to be a Falcon 9 copy. At this moment there are no reports out of China of what happened, though Jonathan McDowell reports on X of speculation that it was a failure. We will know more in a day or so.
Space Pioneer is the pseudo-company that in 2024 had this rocket’s first stage do an unplanned launch during a static fire engine test. That incident delayed this launch attempt by at least one year.











