ROUTINE BUT NEVER BORING: SpaceX rounds out third quarter with 70 launches for the year.

So far we’ve seen SpaceX launch 70 rockets in the year, beating the company’s 2022 record of 61. This was the company’s fourth straight year of beating its year to date record from the previous year. In 2020 when this current streak started, SpaceX was only able to launch 26 times that year.

Starlink has played a huge role in getting SpaceX’s launch numbers so high. The company began launching Gen 2 “Mini” Starlink satellites to expand but also replace the now four plus year old Gen 1 satellites. Out of the 70 launches so far this year, only 27 were non-Starlink missions, including NASA crewed and cargo flights, some commercial satellite flights, and missions for the DoD.
Of course the Falcon 9 has carried the vast majority of those 70 launches.

However, 2023 has been a good year for Falcon Heavy flights from SpaceX. Practically a Falcon 9 with two extra first stages strapped to its sides as boosters, the Falcon Heavy laid dormant for several years since its first round of commercial launches in 2019. That changed when the Space Force launched its first mission on a Falcon Heavy at the end of 2022 and since then we’ve seen three more launches this year with a fourth, NASA’s Psyche spacecraft, coming next week.

A close friend of mine spent many years building and launching rockets for ULA and, before that, Lockheed-Martin, and Martin Marietta. Before SpaceX proved reusability was feasible and profitable, he explained to me one of the reasons it would “never work.” ULA and others had looked into reusability for decades and determined there wasn’t enough launch demand to make it profitable. He was very sincere but, in the end, also very wrong.

SpaceX’s Starlink helps create the demand that SpaceX uses to generate the profits that keep SpaceX rockets a generation (or two) ahead of the competition. That’s about as slick a business model as any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes.