60 More Starlink Satellites Reach Orbit, But SpaceX Loses the Booster
A Falcon 9 delivered 60 Starlink satellites Monday night, but its first stage missed the droneship, prompting a review of upcoming launches.
SpaceX got another batch of Starlink satellites up late Monday night, launching a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral at 10:59 p.m. EST with 60 more satellites bound for orbit. The deployment itself went off without a hitch — all 60 satellites separated from the second stage as planned, joining a constellation that’s been growing at a steady clip for over a year now.
The part that didn’t go according to plan was the booster recovery. The first stage was supposed to come back down and land on one of SpaceX’s droneships stationed in the Atlantic, and it missed. No landing this time.
That’s notable mostly because it’s become so routine to expect otherwise. SpaceX has landed boosters often enough that a miss is the exception rather than the rule these days, which is exactly why it’s getting attention now. The company hasn’t published a detailed explanation yet, but the response is telling: SpaceX is pausing to review its remaining Starlink launches planned for the rest of February before flying again.
Why the pause matters
A booster loss isn’t just about one rocket. Falcon 9’s economics depend heavily on reusing first stages across multiple flights, and Starlink launches in particular have been a proving ground for pushing boosters through more and more reflights. If something on this particular landing attempt pointed to a hardware or procedural issue, SpaceX would rather find it now than fly the same profile again next week and risk a repeat.
It’s also a reminder that landing a first stage on a floating platform in the ocean is still, fundamentally, a hard problem. The margins are tight — wind, sea state, and the booster’s own guidance all have to line up close to perfectly for a touchdown on a deck that’s smaller than a basketball court, bobbing in open water. SpaceX has made it look almost boring through repetition, but “almost boring” is not the same as “solved.”
For Starlink specifically, the satellites are the priority, and those made it to orbit fine. The constellation keeps expanding regardless of what happens to the booster underneath it, which is part of why SpaceX can afford to pause and investigate rather than rush the next flight out the door. There’s no urgent deadline forcing a launch before the review is done.
Expect a fairly quick turnaround once SpaceX identifies whatever went wrong — landing anomalies in the past have typically been traced to specific, fixable causes rather than deep design flaws. Whether the rest of February’s Starlink launches stay on the original schedule or slip a bit while engineers pore over the data is the open question now. Either way, the batch of satellites that just reached orbit will start going through the checkout process before eventually joining the active constellation.