SpaceX Ships Another 60 Starlink Satellites While Starship SN6 Hops Again in Texas
SpaceX launched 60 more Starlink satellites and stuck the booster landing today, while the Starship SN6 prototype completed its second short test hop in Boca Chica.
Busy day for SpaceX. This morning a Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida carrying another 60 Starlink satellites, and the first stage booster landed successfully afterward. That’s mission number 16 for the company this year — a pace that would have sounded absurd a few years ago, and now it’s basically routine.
At this point Starlink batches are starting to blend together, which is sort of the point. This is a constellation being built through sheer repetition: same rocket, same fairing routine, same droneship recovery, sixty more satellites stacked into orbit. The interesting story isn’t any single launch anymore, it’s the cumulative count. With this batch added in, SpaceX has put well over 700 Starlink satellites into orbit this year alone. Beta testing for the internet service has reportedly been expanding to more users, and each of these launches is presumably filling in coverage gaps and adding capacity.
Landing the booster again barely registers as news at this point, which itself says something. A few years ago a successful landing was the headline. Now it’s the assumed outcome, and the story is whichever satellites are riding on top.
Meanwhile, in Texas
The same day, out at Boca Chica, the Starship SN6 prototype flew again. It was a short, low-altitude hop test — not a flashy leap in altitude or profile from the previous hop, but a second successful flight of a full-scale Starship prototype using a single Raptor engine. SN6 lifted off, held a hover, and set back down.
It’s worth remembering how different this program is from the Falcon 9 side of the business. Starlink launches are SpaceX executing a mature, repeatable process. Starship is the opposite: an experimental vehicle being iterated in public, with prototypes that sometimes explode on the test stand before ever getting off the ground. SN4 didn’t make it to a hop before a static fire mishap. SN5 finally got one a few weeks back. Now SN6 has repeated that success, which suggests the low-altitude hop profile is becoming something SpaceX can do somewhat reliably, even if it’s still far short of what full orbital-class Starship flights will eventually require.
Two data points doesn’t make a trend, but it’s a reasonable one to watch for. If SN6’s hop went as cleanly as reported, the next logical step is probably pushing altitude higher, or moving toward the kind of “belly flop” horizontal descent and flip maneuver that Starship will need to nail for its full reentry profile. That’s a much harder test than hovering a few dozen meters off the pad, and it’s not clear when SpaceX will attempt it.
Taken together, today is a decent snapshot of where SpaceX is right now: a fully operational launch business quietly grinding out an internet constellation, and an experimental next-generation rocket program taking small, incremental, occasionally explosive steps toward something far more ambitious. Both threads matter, they just move on completely different clocks.