“This is rocket science!” Elon Musk jokingly said once, referencing both the difficulty and the boldness of SpaceX’s endeavors. Most of Florida was still sleeping early Tuesday morning, but meanwhile, the company’s Falcon 9 was poised to launch from Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The Starlink 10-28 mission, which was launching 28 broadband satellites, was scheduled to fly on a northeasterly course into low-Earth orbit at 4:21 a.m., another notch in an unparalleled year of launch activity. The 2025 launch pace is nothing short of astounding. With this mission, SpaceX hit its 59th orbital launch out of Cape Canaveral and Kennedy Space Center this year alone, a number which places into perspective the company’s unrelenting pace. Anne Mason, director of national security space launch at SpaceX, recently said, “We’re targeting 170 launches by the end of the year,” a figure which, if achieved, would see a Falcon rocket depart Earth every other day or so. She continued, If we look back just five years ago, in 2020 when we launched roughly 25 times now launching on average every two to three days I think this demonstrates how Falcon’s reusability and reliability, plus the hard work and dedication of the SpaceX team, has been critical to supporting assured access to space. The industry benchmarks for SpaceX’s launch tempo have become its reusability and reliability.
The foundation of this launch rhythm is the reusability of the Falcon 9. The Block 5 version, first flown in 2018, was designed with quick turnaround and high performance. Incremental improvements from reinforced landing legs to advanced flight control systems have allowed first stages to be flown up to 20 times, with little refurbishment between missions. The company’s history boasts more than 100 successful landings on firm ground and drone ships, as well as a mounting number of reused payload fairings, a feat previously considered unlikely in the launch business. The expendable upper stage is made one every two and a half days, says Mason, keeping the supply in step with demand.
Starlink, SpaceX’s increasingly large broadband constellation, was responsible for most of them. Of the 64 Falcon 9 flights so far in 2025, 48 have been for Starlink alone, growing what is already the largest satellite constellation in history to over 7,500 active spacecraft. This is only possible due to the reusability of the Falcon 9 and the efficiency of the Cape Canaveral launch complex. In addition to commercial broadband, the U.S. relationship with SpaceX just gets stronger. In the latest news, Space Force officials issued a contract worth $81.6 million for SpaceX to conduct the USSF-178 mission in the first half of fiscal year 2027. The mission will deploy the Weather System Follow-on-Microwave Space Vehicle 2 and the BLAZE-2 small satellite payload. The WSF-M2, built by Ball Aerospace, is intended to address essential Department of Defense needs in space-based environmental sensing.
It will have a passive microwave imaging radiometer and a government-provided energetic charged particle sensor, taking global measurements of atmospheric and oceanic states essential for weather forecasting over ocean areas and for observing tropical cyclone strength and space weather events.
The WSF-M2 uses the Ball Configurable Platform, a 50-year on-orbit legacy spacecraft bus, and the Global Precipitation Measurement Microwave Imager, the calibration standard for precipitation in NASA’s GPM constellation. The mission, and its sister mission WSF-M1, are intended to bring continuity and enhancement to the aging DMSP fleet, assuring the Department of Defense a technological advantage in environmental intelligence. While SpaceX keeps redefining what’s possible in launch operations, the synergy of reusability, agile manufacturing, and partnerships with governments is here. Starlink 10-28 is not simply another launch it’s a testament to the engineering advances that’ve enabled almost-daily access to space, and an indicator of how next-gen weather satellites such as WSF-M2 will leverage this new launch cadence and reliability.
