SpaceX About to Set a new Re-use Record?

If all goes according to the stated plans, Thursday night local (PDT) time to early morning Friday EDT SpaceX will set a new record for the shortest turnaround time for a booster between flights.  By a large enough margin that they don't even need to do it tonight. 

A Falcon 9 rocket is scheduled to lift off from California's Vandenberg Space Force Base Friday at 2:49 a.m. EDT (0649 GMT; 11:49 p.m. on March 20 local California time), on the NROL-57 mission for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).

This rocket's first stage also lofted the SPHEREx space telescope and PUNCH solar probes for NASA on March 11, according to a SpaceX mission description. An on-time liftoff for NROL-57 would therefore be the booster's second in a little over nine days, besting the previous Falcon 9 turnaround record of 14 days. [Bold added. - SiG]

If the launch goes off as scheduled, that's just nine days and four hours since the SPHEREx mission.  That means if they don't launch for another five days, they can still set their own record by beating the previous record of 14 days.  It's not like they compete with any launch provider other than themselves for records like this.  Nobody else is routinely reusing orbital boosters besides them at anywhere near the pace they're running. 

The booster for this mission, B1088, will be flying its fourth mission so it currently wears the name B1088.3, which will increment to B1088.4 if the launch is successful.  The booster is scheduled to land at the Vandenberg landing zone, not offshore on a recovery drone ship. That'll be approximately 7-1/2 minutes after launch.  The mission itself is for the NROL and called NROL-57.

NROL-57 will be the eighth launch of the NRO's "proliferated architecture," which the agency describes as "a new paradigm for assets the NRO is putting on orbit."

That paradigm features "numerous, smaller satellites designed for capability and resilience," NRO officials wrote in an NROL-57 mission description.

As you'd expect with the National Reconnaissance Office, the description there doesn't say much.  The common rumor is that the "proliferated architecture" network is thought to consist of the special version of Starlink satellites that SpaceX is providing to the NRO as "Starshield." 

Note that the previous seven proliferated architecture missions have all launched from Vandenberg on Falcon 9 rockets.

Obligatory pretty picture of a Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg Space Force Base, SLC-4E. Same launch pad, different mission. Image credit: SpaceX 

EDIT 3/21 at 0920 to add:  The mission lifted off as scheduled at 0649 UTC setting the re-use record as expected.