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SpaceX just reached a major milestone, and this time it doesn’t have anything to do with the Starship mega-rocket. While that vehicle will eventually take over SpaceX’s launch operations, the Falcon 9 is still the workhorse in 2023. The company completed yet another Falcon 9 launch today, setting a record by flying the same booster an incredible 16 times.
It’s easy to focus on Starship’s lagging timeline and high-profile failures, but SpaceX remains the only aerospace firm that has cracked the code on reusable rockets. It’s now commonplace for SpaceX to launch Falcon 9s and recover the boosters for refurbishment. Before the Falcon 9, all commercial rockets were expendable—you needed an entirely new rocket for every launch. Recovering the first stage has dramatically lowered SpaceX’s launch costs, so it can afford to launch thousands of Starlink internet satellites.
In a few years, SpaceX leapfrogged everyone else to become the single largest satellite operator in the world, with more than 4,000 operational Starlink constellation nodes. The July 10 launch was again deploying Starlink satellites, but this time it was another batch of the company’s new V2 Mini satellites. These 22 satellites have several improvements over V1 satellites, but they are just a stopgap until Starship is online and ready to deploy the true second-gen Starlink satellites.
Following the successful release of the second stage, the booster descended toward the surface and used its engines to lend gently on the deck of SpaceX’s drone ship Just Read the Instructions. This booster (B1058) was already somewhat famous before breaking SpaceX’s re-flight record. It flew initially in 2020 on the NASA Demo-2 mission, the first crewed flight for the Falcon 9. At the time, NASA and SpaceX wanted to use a fresh rocket, but more recent crewed missions have used pre-flown boosters. That’s impressive progress for the world’s first reusable commercial rocket.
This is probably a record we’ll see beaten again before long. SpaceX has several other boosters with high flight counts, and its Starlink launches will only accelerate. It’ll be at least a few years before any Starship can take the crown, but switching entirely to Starship and retiring the Falcon 9 is on SpaceX’s roadmap. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has claimed that Starship and Super Heavy can fly multiple times per day, so it might not take long for Starship to rack up launches after it’s complete.
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