Within hours of the FAA clearing SpaceX to resume launches, the company did so most emphatically, launching twice in little more than an hour apart from opposite coasts.
First the company placed 20 Starlink satellites into orbit, its Falcon 9 rocket lifting off from Cape Canaveral. The first stage completed its eighteenth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Atlantic.
Then, one hour and five minutes later, the company launched 21 Starlink satellites, the Falcon 9 lifting off from Vandenberg in California. That first stage completed its ninth flight, landing on a drone ship in the Pacific.
This fast return to flight underlines the unnecessary delay of at least one day in launches caused by the FAA’s red tape. SpaceX had scheduled at least one of these launches the previous night — and was clearly ready to launch — but had to cancel it because the FAA stood in the way.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
86 SpaceX
36 China
10 Rocket Lab
9 Russia
American private enterprise now leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 101 to 54, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies 86 to 69.
2024 is now the second year in a row the U.S. rocket industry has completed more than 100 launches, something it could not do for the first three-quarters of a century after Sputnik, when our precious government used NASA to run our entire space program. Now that freedom and capitalism has managed to wrest some control away from NASA, Americans are finally doing what they would have done in the 1960s, had Congress and President Kennedy not stepped in, first requiring all space exploration be run under a “space program” controlled by NASA, and then passing the Communications Satellite Act in 1962 which forbid Americans from running private profit-oriented launches without government participation.
