SpaceX Closes Out a Record Year with Turksat-5B

SpaceX has a window open for tonight and tomorrow to send Turksat-5B, a Turkish communications satellite, into orbit from Cape Canaveral’s SLC-40. A Falcon 9 will do the lifting, which by this point in 2021 barely qualifies as news on its own — except that it does, because this is shaping up to be the busiest year Falcon 9 has ever had.

Turksat-5B isn’t glamorous. It’s a geostationary comms satellite built to expand broadcast and broadband capacity for Turkey, and missions like this are the unglamorous backbone of SpaceX’s manifest: telecom operators buying rides because Falcon 9 is reliable and, relative to the alternatives, cheap. It’s the sibling to Turksat-5A, which flew earlier this year on the same kind of mission profile. Nobody’s writing breathless threads about a comsat launch, but this is exactly the kind of flight that keeps the launch cadence humming and the company’s revenue diversified beyond Starlink and NASA contracts.

What’s actually notable is the number attached to it. This launch is part of a push toward a record 31 Falcon 9 flights in 2021. To put that in perspective, a “healthy” year for the entire global launch industry not that long ago might have totaled in the twenties across every provider combined. SpaceX alone is on pace to blow past that this December, and December itself has been relentless — Turksat-5B is one of several missions crammed into the tail end of the year as the company works through a packed backlog before flipping the calendar.

A few things make this cadence possible, and worth remembering next time a launch feels routine:

• Booster reuse is doing the heavy lifting. Most of these flights are riding on boosters that have already flown multiple times. The turnaround between landing and re-flight keeps shrinking, and that’s the whole ballgame for launch economics.
• SLC-40 and LC-39A are basically running in shifts. Splitting Falcon 9 traffic across two pads at Florida’s Space Coast is what lets SpaceX stack missions back to back without a single pad becoming the bottleneck.
• The customer mix is broadening. Government payloads, commercial telecom birds like Turksat-5B, Starlink batches, and the occasional crewed mission are all sharing the same rocket family and the same production line.

I’ll be curious to see the final tally once the year closes out. Thirty-one launches from one vehicle family, in one year, from one company, was the kind of number that would’ve sounded like science fiction a decade ago. Whether that pace holds into 2022 — especially once Starship starts eating into engineering and operational attention — is an open question. For now, though, all eyes are on Cape Canaveral tonight, waiting to see if the weather and the countdown cooperate for Turksat-5B.