Go ahead and say this sentence - that nobody on Earth could say before

Here's the short version of this sentence, a sentence that nobody alive on Earth could have said honestly yesterday.  "A rocket just flew its 35th orbital mission and stuck the landing coming back."

Or how about a longer, more informative sentence?  Falcon 9 booster B1067 turned 5 years old—and just set another reuse record. A rocket developed by a private company, manned by a staff largely not from the existing government-run space programs. 

Yeah, what's gotten to feel like an old friend, booster 1067 - the fleet leader, broke the 35th flight barrier, just like it has broken the previous 34 flight milestones, essentially flawlessly. Eric Berger at Ars Technica begins his coverage this way:

A little more than five years ago, a shiny white Falcon 9 rocket made its debut flight, boosting a Cargo Dragon spacecraft to the International Space Station. Over the next year, it would launch a pair of astronaut missions and a handful of commercial spacecraft.

But since then, this first stage booster, designated B 1067, has mostly flown Starlink missions. It has launched them one after another, always returning safely to a drone ship before undergoing refurbishment and flying again. Sometimes it has flown twice in a single month.

Something that I regularly get reminded of is how in their early days, nobody had any idea how many flights they could get out of a Falcon 9 and I recall reading quotes about how someday they hoped they could get 10 flights out of one. Now a booster with 10 flights is considered, "like new." I remember them making the 20th flight (it wasn't B1067) and it was all still experimental, but the talk had shifted to their expecting to certify for 40 flights. Here's the kicker: that was just over two years ago; April of '24. 

Eric Berger asks if 40 is really the goal, or will they extend it again? He doesn't ask "why stop at 40?" But he does say something important: We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. But we probably shouldn’t.

We take the Falcon 9 rocket for granted. It now launches so often—a few times a week—that its flights are a complete non-event. Even a milestone like a 35th launch and landing, bringing it closer to space shuttle Discovery‘s record of 39 spaceflights across nearly four decades, seems hardly worth mentioning. 

But in reality, the Falcon 9 rocket is the bedrock of SpaceX’s success today. And whatever one might think of the company’s impending IPO—whether it’s a financial boondoggle or a long-awaited opportunity for investors to own a piece of SpaceX—its valuation is largely due to the Falcon 9 vehicle.

B1067 flies for the 35th time on the Starlink 9-35 mission this morning, a few minutes before sunrise. Image credit: SpaceX

Let's wind up this fan-letter with some perspective.

Finally, it’s worth considering just how much work this single Falcon 9 rocket, once so clean and shiny and now so dark and grimy, has accomplished in its short lifetime.

For some context, consider the performance of SpaceX’s top US-based competitor in medium- and heavy-lift launch, United Launch Alliance. Since Booster 1067 made its debut in June 2021, the company has flown its workhorse Atlas V rocket a total of 22 times and the Vulcan rocket four times, and the Delta IV Heavy vehicle made its final three flights.

So in the time that this single Falcon 9 first stage has flown and landed 35 times, its competitor company has made 29 total launches. Put another way, this rocket has put more mass into orbit than more than two dozen expendable rockets over half a decade of effort.

I think that last observation is good way to define excellence.