Less than three hours after SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy lifted off tonight at Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A, the company launched a Falcon 9 from SLC-40 carrying the Starlink 6-36 mission. Falcon Heavy lifted off at 8:07pm local time, and two hours and forty-eight minutes later, Falcon 9 roared off its pad at 11:01pm. Roughly eight and one-half minutes later, the booster used for this flight successfully touched down aboard the droneship ‘A Shortfall of Gravitas’ near the Bahamas, marking SpaceX’s third successful booster soft-landing of the night.

New Modern Record Turnaround

The short time gap is a new record for SpaceX. For the Eastern Range, the shortest time between launches was set in 1966 the Gemini program. First, an Agena target vehicle was launched, and one hour, forty-nine minutes and fifty-nine seconds later, Gemini 8 launched and carried astronauts Neil Armstrong and Dave Scott to orbit and in pursuit of the Agena vehicle.

During that time, of course, NASA did not have the launch cadence that SpaceX has successfully navigated in 2023: the company has completed 98 orbital launches in 2023, with ninety-one of those being Falcon 9 launches from Kennedy Space Center, Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg in California. They launched Falcon Heavy five times from KSC, and conducted two Starship Heavy test flights — easily the most of any space-launch organization globally. By comparison, China set a new national record at sixty-five launches this year.

Abhi Tripathi, a former SpaceX Mission director and NASA engineer remarked on X this evening that “even in 2016 or 2017 most people polled inside SpaceX would find it difficult to believe we’d achieve this by 2023. The number of things that had to be practiced and perfected is staggering.”

Payload

Starlink 6-36 was another tranche of twenty-three Starlink satellites, and will join SpaceX’s constellation of Internet communication network that has over two million users globally. The company has launched over 5,500 similar satellites, which broadens the service’s reach and reliability.

Booster 1069

Tonight’s flight was Booster 1069’s twelfth flight. It has previous carried CRS-24 to ISS for NASA, SES-18 & SES-19 C-band satellites for SES, Hotbird-13 for Eutelsat as well as several other Starlink missions. After returning to Port Canaveral, the booster will be transported to SpaceX’s refurbishment facility in Kennedy Space Center, inspected and presumably refurbished and prepared for another flight at some point in the future.

Tonight’s launch was the last one for Space Coast in 2023.