SpaceX sets B1067's new record and then turns the world upside down

... at least the world around the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station was turned upside down in the afternoon. 

As mentioned in yesterday's post, booster B1067 flew for the 37th time setting a new corporate record for the number of missions it has flown. When I read about these milestones being set, there's a common comparison to Space Shuttle Discovery having flown 39 times. I don't particularly think that's a meaningful comparison for a few reasons. The biggest is that Shuttle missions were always manned while Falcon 9 missions are only manned rarely, and the rework to fly a manned mission vehicle is always done more carefully than non-manned. Still, if they're trying to break Discovery's 39 flights record, that means that three more flights of B1067 sets a new world record for spacecraft reusability. I have regularly wondered if SpaceX has that as an explicit goal inside the company. 

As (bad) luck would have it, my side note of probably sleeping through the launch rather than going out in the yard to watch it turned into reality, but worse than that in a way. I was up at the launch time but it was because I was having a bad allergy attack (itchy, burning eyes, runny nose, sneezing...) While lying in bed trying to decide what to do, I suddenly heard the launch. By the time the noise gets here it's close to three minutes after launch and the chance of seeing anything approaches zero, unless you have a pretty solid idea of where to look. 

But, as noted at the start, the real big change of the day was in the afternoon. 

SpaceX made Florida’s Space Coast home to the world’s busiest spaceport for a decade, but that will change this year. The company is significantly cutting the number of launches from Florida until Starship arrives, a senior SpaceX official confirmed Tuesday. 

Last year, the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station provided 165 Falcon 9 launches, pretty much three flights per week—and about 75 percent of them carried Starlink satellites. To borrow the saying, "that was last year, this is now." So far Vandenberg Space Force Base has launched more Falcon 9 missions than Cape Canaveral, and it looks as if that will continue for the rest of the year. 

Kiko Dontchev, the company’s vice president of launch, said today that this morning's launch from the Cape was the last planned Starlink mission from Cape Canaveral until SpaceX begins flying Starship missions from Florida. A quick search of NextSpaceflight.com shows it to be the case. There are launches from CCSFS, the manned Crew-13 flight on September 12th, the O3b mPOWER 11, 12 & 13 satellites on Sept. 19th (and satellites with names in the "O3b mPOWER" world have launched here before). There are no missions labelled Starlink. 

It's easy to overlook that while launches have been categorized as "Starlink" that those satellites have gotten bigger in every generation - and we can expect that to continue. The coming Starlink Version 3 sats won't be a reasonable payload for Falcon 9, much more reasonable for Starship, but for at least the remainder of the year, instead of the two (and sometimes three) Falcon 9 launches per week, that will drop to perhaps two per month. Starlink V3 satellites have not been launched yet because the Falcon 9 can only carry a few

It wasn’t long ago when two launches per month was the norm, an indication just how quickly SpaceX’s launch cadence has grown. Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center sit on adjoining property and share the same range on Florida’s east coast, so it is worth considering them a single spaceport. The last time the Florida spaceport did not lead the world in space launches was in 2015.
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Starship is sized to launch up to 60 Starlink Version 3 satellites, which are larger, heavier, and more powerful than the Starlink V2s flying on Falcon 9. SpaceX plans to use the next test flight of Starship, designated Flight 14, to launch the first Starlink V3s into low-Earth orbit from Starbase, Texas, as soon as next month.

The upper stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket flies over Lower Manhattan in New York City on Tuesday morning. Credit: Gary Hershorn/Getty Images

Of course, this doesn't impact anything else launching from the CCSFS and KSC - it probably makes life easier for Blue Origin and ULA by reducing crowding. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this Sunday on a Falcon Heavy at 7:26AM EDT. The next SpaceX mission is the Crew-13 mission to the ISS on Saturday, September 12.