On a quiet October morning in California, a rocket rose from Vandenberg Space Force Base and slipped into orbit — the 135th time SpaceX has done so in 2025 alone. In eleven months, the company has matched what NASA's space shuttle achieved across three decades, not through spectacle, but through the patient, relentless refinement of a machine that lands itself, rests briefly, and flies again. What was once the frontier of human ambition has become, almost imperceptibly, infrastructure.
SpaceX hits 135th orbital launch of 2025, shattering its own yearly record
More orbital launches in eleven months than thirty years of shuttle history
Mark
Why does the 135th launch matter more than, say, the 134th?
Mimi
Because it's a record—it breaks what SpaceX itself did last year. But more than that, it's a marker of how the baseline has shifted. A hundred launches in a year would have been unthinkable five years ago.
Mark
The comparison to the space shuttle is striking. Thirty years versus eleven months.
Mimi
It's meant to be. It shows how different the economics and engineering have become. The shuttle was incredible, but it was also expensive and slow to turn around. Falcon 9 is designed for speed and reuse from the ground up.
Mark
What does it mean that booster 1081 has landed nineteen times?
Mimi
It means the rocket is doing what it was designed to do—come back, get refueled, and go again. Every landing is data. Every reuse proves the concept works at scale.
Mark
Are we running out of things to launch?
Mimi
Not even close. Starlink alone has ten thousand satellites in orbit now, and they're still building the constellation. Other companies want to launch too. The capacity is there; the demand is catching up.
Mark
What happens when SpaceX launches Starship at this cadence?
Mimi
That's the question everyone's asking. Starship is bigger, more powerful, designed for Mars and beyond. If they can achieve with Starship what they've done with Falcon 9, the entire space industry changes again.
Il Polso
- SpaceX's 135th orbital launch of 2025 broke the company's own annual record with two months still remaining in the year.
- A single booster has now flown and landed nineteen times, while another in the fleet has reached thirty-one reuses — numbers that strain the original engineering assumptions that produced them.
- The deployment of the ten-thousandth Starlink satellite signals that what began as an experimental constellation is now a planetary-scale communications network taking shape in low Earth orbit.
- Five Starship test flights this year run parallel to the Falcon 9 cadence, suggesting SpaceX is not consolidating around one capability but simultaneously building the next one.
- The pace shows no sign of plateauing — each reuse lowers costs, each lower cost enables more launches, and each launch tightens the feedback loop further.
On a quiet October morning in California, a rocket rose from Vandenberg Space Force Base and slipped into orbit — the 135th time SpaceX has done so in 2025 alone. In eleven months, the company has matched what NASA's space shuttle achieved across three decades, not through spectacle, but through the patient, relentless refinement of a machine that lands itself, rests briefly, and flies again. What was once the frontier of human ambition has become, almost imperceptibly, infrastructure.
On October 25, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:20 a.m. local time, carrying 28 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. It was SpaceX's 135th orbital mission of the year — a record surpassing even the company's own 2024 performance of 132 Falcon 9 flights, two Falcon Heavy launches, and four Starship tests.
The launch itself was unremarkable by design. Booster 1081 separated, descended, and landed on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" about eight and a half minutes after liftoff — its nineteenth successful recovery. The upper stage continued upward, releasing its payload roughly an hour later. This choreography of descent and ascent, booster returning while satellites climb, has grown so routine it barely draws notice.
Yet the cumulative weight of that routine is staggering. In eleven months, SpaceX has completed as many orbital missions as NASA's space shuttle managed across thirty years of operation. Every one of those 135 flights this year has been a Falcon 9 — a rocket now so refined that reuse is not a milestone but a schedule item. One booster in the fleet has flown thirty-one times, well beyond what early specifications imagined possible.
Recent weeks added texture to the tally: one mission deployed the ten-thousandth Starlink satellite, a number that seemed almost fictional when the constellation was young. Five Starship test flights have run alongside the Falcon 9 cadence this year, signaling that SpaceX is not resting on its workhorse but building what comes next.
The 135th launch is not a summit. It is a waypoint — evidence that the normalization of orbital spaceflight is not a future condition to be achieved, but a present one already underway.
SpaceX launched another batch of Starlink satellites from California on October 25, marking its 135th orbital flight of the year—a record that surpasses even the company's own performance from 2024. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:20 a.m. local time, carrying 28 internet satellites bound for low Earth orbit. The mission was routine in execution but extraordinary in its place within a larger pattern of acceleration that has reshaped what's possible in spaceflight.
What makes this launch noteworthy is not the satellites themselves, but the sheer velocity at which SpaceX is now moving. In just eleven months, the company has completed as many orbital missions as NASA's space shuttle program accomplished across its entire thirty-year operational lifespan. Every single one of those 135 flights this year has been a Falcon 9—the company's workhorse rocket, now refined to the point where it can be launched, recovered, and launched again with a regularity that would have seemed impossible a decade ago.
The booster that flew today, designated 1081, touched down on the drone ship "Of Course I Still Love You" roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff, marking its nineteenth successful landing and reuse. Meanwhile, the rocket's upper stage continued its journey, eventually releasing the 28 Starlink satellites into their operational orbit about an hour after the initial ascent. This separation of concerns—the booster returning to Earth while the payload continues upward—has become so routine that it barely registers as remarkable anymore, even though it represents a fundamental shift in how humanity accesses space.
The broader context makes the achievement even more striking. SpaceX has also conducted five suborbital test flights of its Starship megarocket this year, the company's next-generation vehicle designed for even heavier payloads and longer-duration missions. In 2024, by comparison, SpaceX flew 132 Falcon 9 missions, two flights of the more powerful Falcon Heavy variant, and four Starship tests. The trajectory is unmistakable: more launches, more diversity, more ambition.
Recent weeks have added additional milestones to the tally. One mission deployed the ten-thousandth Starlink satellite to orbit, a number that seemed almost fictional just a few years ago when the constellation was in its infancy. Another flight marked the thirty-first launch of a single booster, numbered 1067, demonstrating that these rockets can be reused far more extensively than the original engineering specifications suggested. Each reuse drives down costs and drives up cadence, creating a feedback loop that accelerates the entire enterprise.
What's happening here is less about any single launch and more about the normalization of something that was once considered science fiction. SpaceX has moved from proving that rockets could land themselves to proving that they could land themselves dozens of times. The company has moved from launching satellites occasionally to launching them by the dozens, week after week, month after month. The 135th launch of 2025 is not a peak—it's a waypoint on a trajectory that shows no signs of flattening.
Citazioni salienti
SpaceX has completed more orbital launches in 11 months than NASA's space shuttle achieved in 30 years of operation— Space.com reporting
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