SpaceX Notches Its 13th Falcon 9 Launch of the Year
SpaceX flew its 13th Falcon 9 mission of 2020, sending up Starlink satellites on a five-time-flown booster.
SpaceX put another Falcon 9 in the air today, and at this point it barely even registers as news around the office anymore — which is kind of the point. This was the company’s 13th Falcon 9 launch of 2020, and the 90th Falcon 9 flight overall since the rocket debuted back in 2010. The mission carried a fresh batch of Starlink satellites along with a couple of secondary payloads riding along for the trip.
What I keep coming back to, though, isn’t the satellites. It’s the booster.
The real story is B1051
The first stage used today, designated B1051, just flew for the fifth time. Five flights on one booster. Rewind a few years and the entire premise of reusable orbital rockets was still treated as a neat trick that might save a little money on the margins. Now it’s a workhorse assumption baked into the launch schedule. SpaceX lands these things, inspects them, refuels them, and sends them back up with what looks increasingly like assembly-line regularity.
B1051 has a bit of a resume by this point — it’s flown Crew Dragon’s uncrewed demo mission and multiple Starlink batches among its five outings. Watching a single piece of hardware rack up that kind of flight history is the clearest signal yet that the “rapid reusability” pitch SpaceX has been selling for years is actually happening, not just theoretically possible.
Why the pace matters
Thirteen launches in a little over seven months puts SpaceX on a trajectory that would have sounded absurd for any launch provider a decade ago. Compare that to the entire history of the Falcon 9 program getting to 90 flights total, and you can see the curve bending — a huge chunk of that flight count has landed in just the last couple of years as reuse turned from occasional bonus to default mode of operation.
The Starlink angle is worth watching too, separate from the booster milestone. Every one of these launches adds more satellites to a constellation that’s quietly becoming one of the largest in orbit. SpaceX hasn’t been shy about the ambition here: blanket the planet with broadband from low Earth orbit. Whether that pans out as a business is still an open question, but the deployment cadence itself is impressive as an engineering and logistics feat, independent of whatever the internet service ends up looking like.
None of this is a single dramatic breakthrough. It’s the opposite — it’s the routine-ization of something that used to be extraordinary. A rocket stage flying five times without much fanfare is, in its own quiet way, one of the bigger stories in spaceflight this year. If SpaceX keeps this cadence up, don’t be surprised if a booster crosses ten flights before too long. I wouldn’t bet against it.