SpaceX hits 600 landings
- What happened: SpaceX completed another Falcon 9 launch and marked a milestone in reusable‑booster recoveries. - The key specific: The April 19 mission carried 25 Starlink satellites and recorded SpaceX's 600th Falcon first‑stage landing. - Context/reaction: The milestone underscores how routine booster recovery has become amid high launch cadence and commercial satellite deployment (space.com).
SpaceX recorded its 600th Falcon first-stage landing on April 19, after a Falcon 9 launched 25 Starlink satellites from California. (spacex.com) (space.com) The rocket lifted off at 9:03 a.m. Pacific time from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base. SpaceX said the satellites were headed to low-Earth orbit, the band of space a few hundred miles up where Starlink operates. (spacex.com) About an hour after launch, the mission deployed all 25 spacecraft. The booster then landed on the droneship *Of Course I Still Love You* in the Pacific Ocean, completing the 600th recovery of a Falcon first stage. (space.com) (spaceflightnow.com) A Falcon first stage is the bottom section with the main engines, the part that does the hardest work getting off the pad. SpaceX flies that section back for landing so it can be inspected, refueled and used again instead of thrown away after one launch. (spacex.com) That recovery system has shifted from a test program into routine operations. SpaceX said this booster, B1097, was flying for the eighth time, after earlier missions that included Sentinel-6B, *Twilight* and six previous Starlink launches. (spacex.com) The milestone came during one of SpaceX’s highest-cadence businesses: building out Starlink, the company’s broadband network in orbit. Space.com reported the April 19 launch raised the number of Starlink satellites in orbit to more than 10,275. (space.com) The same launch site had hosted another 25-satellite Starlink mission on April 14, and that booster was on its 21st flight. Five days later, SpaceX used a different booster for its eighth flight and still added another landing to the total, showing how often the company now reuses hardware across missions. (spacex.com 1) (spacex.com 2) By April 19, rockets in the Falcon 9 family had flown 640 times, according to the running launch list maintained by Wikipedia’s editors, a public tally widely used by space trackers. The landing count is lower than the launch count because some missions do not attempt recovery and some boosters have been lost. (wikipedia.org) The 600th landing did not come on a test flight or a one-off demonstration. It came on another Sunday Starlink run from the California coast, with another booster returning to a ship at sea. (spacex.com)
