SpaceX Launches 60 More Starlink Satellites, Nails Another Landing

SpaceX put another 60 Starlink satellites into orbit today, lifting off from Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 3:30pm EDT. The Falcon 9 booster came back down for a landing on the droneship a few minutes later, and by now that part of the show barely raises an eyebrow — which is itself worth sitting with for a second. Powered rocket landings used to be the stuff of animated concept videos. Now they’re routine enough that the interesting number from today’s launch isn’t the landing at all.

The interesting number is 84. This was the 84th flight of a Falcon 9, which makes it the most-flown active rocket in the US fleet. That’s a strange kind of milestone — not the biggest payload, not the highest orbit, just sheer reps. SpaceX has been able to rack up that flight count precisely because of the booster reuse this same mission just demonstrated again. Every successful droneship landing is another data point feeding back into how often they can fly, which is the whole point of the exercise.

Seven down

This is the seventh batch of 60 satellites for the Starlink constellation, meaning well over 400 satellites are now in orbit or on their way to their final operational altitude (SpaceX deploys them lower initially and lets onboard thrusters raise them over the following weeks). The company has said it wants some minimal level of US and Canada coverage with something in the range of a few hundred more satellites, so if the cadence holds, meaningful broadband service starting to come online this year isn’t out of the question.

What’s notable about the pace is that it hasn’t really let up during a period where a lot of the rest of the world has ground to a halt. Launch operations obviously look different right now — smaller crews, distancing where possible — but SpaceX has kept flying Starlink missions on what looks like a roughly monthly cadence since November. That consistency is arguably the more impressive engineering achievement than any single landing: it’s one thing to land a booster once, it’s another to build an operation where launching 60 satellites and recovering the rocket is unremarkable enough to happen on schedule.

A few open questions worth watching. SpaceX hasn’t said much publicly about beta testing timelines for Starlink service, though there’s been chatter about invitations going out to select users later this year. There’s also the astronomy community’s ongoing concern about satellite brightness interfering with observations — SpaceX has been experimenting with darker coatings and visors on newer satellites, and it’ll be worth seeing whether today’s batch includes any of those changes once more detail comes out.

For now, the simplest read is the right one: another batch of satellites, another rocket that flew and landed like it was no big deal, and a constellation that’s quietly becoming one of the largest groups of active satellites ever put into orbit by a single operator.