SpaceX racks up 50 launches from Florida’s Space Coast

In the very early hours of Thursday, SpaceX launched its 71st rocket of the year, a run truly for the record books. Of those 71 50 came from the East Coast, a milestone any company would be happy to reach, SpaceX achieved from just one region.

East Coast hits 50th SpaceX launch milestone

SpaceX launched its 50th mission from its East Coast launch pads last Thursday, hitting a milestone some only wish to get for their entire operation. Lifting off from SLC-40 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Starlink Group 6-21 made its way to its designated orbit and deployed the 22 Gen 2 mini Starlink satellites.

After getting the second stage and its payload above the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere, the first stage booster landed on one of SpaceX’s droneships. Named B1076, this was the booster’s eighth mission, debuting back in November 2022 for CRS-26, then flying a OneWeb mission, and finally a lot of Starlink flights.

All this has become rather mundane for rocket launch fans to watch but the milestone of this mission is in the numbers of launches, not the payload. It’s become pretty routine to see a Falcon 9 launch nowadays so you might not have noticed that all of SpaceX’s Falcon launch pads have hit some round number milestones.

SpaceX 2023 to day launches vs 2022 by launch pad

• SLC-40: 40 launches (2022: 30)
• SLC-4E: 20 launches (2022: 13)
• LC-39A: 10 launches (2022: 18)

In 2022, SpaceX was able to launch 48 missions from the East Coast, two less than what they have done so far this year and we still have an entire quarter to go.

SLC-40 took care of 80% of those launches

SpaceX has launched a vast majority of its Falcon 9 missions from SLC-40. In fact, over half of SpaceX launches have taken off from that old Titan III and IV pad. Not to forget that 80% of the launches from the East coast have taken off from SLC-40.

Why is this? Is SLC-40 set up differently to allow for so many launches? That sort of is true, while we don’t know what SpaceX has done, it is believed that it has made upgrades to the pad to allow for faster turnarounds. Some of these turnarounds from SLC-40 have been matter of days – impressive.

LC-39A has also been held up a few times this year with crewed and cargo Dragon flights. SpaceX has also launched three, with an upcoming fourth, Falcon Heavies. These type of missions require much longer preparations ahead of launch which include dress rehearsals and static fires by both SpaceX and NASA personal.

This sort of long downtime between missions would cripple a company trying to launch close to 100 missions in a year. But thankfully, SpaceX operates two pads at the same time from Florida. Sometimes that works in their favor where they can prepare two launches at the same time. And sometimes, SpaceX can even launch two missions just a few hours between each other.

Soon SpaceX will bring that redundancy to both of its East Coast launch sites. You can see over the last few launches from SLC-40 that it is gaining an access tower for crew and cargo to be loaded into a Dragon spacecraft. This will insure that NASA, and SpaceX, have redundant launch pads for Dragon missions to the ISS, incase something goes wrong over at LC-39A.

In a recent fly over by NASASpaceFlight, you can see only one tower segment remains over at SpaceX’s Robert’s Road facility. The rest of the tower segments have already been stacked over at SLC-40. No photos have surfaced yet as to where the crew arm is but we can report that one has definitely been built and is ready to be assembled.

We assumed SpaceX would break from launches to finish assembly of the tower but that hasn’t so far happened. So the number of launches that SLC-40 could end on is up to how much SpaceX can get off before the new year.