Falcon 9 Hits 700 Launches as SpaceX Readies Its Successor

Seven hundred. That is how many times Falcon 9 had flown after the rocket lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base, California, at 9:04 p.m. local time on Friday, 30 October, according to Spaceflight Now. It carried 27 Starlink satellites, its booster B1093 landed on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You about eight and a half minutes later, and the flight closed October as SpaceX's eleventh orbital launch of the month.

The milestone arrives as its own maker plans its retirement. Spaceflight Now reports that SpaceX stopped flying Starlink missions on Falcon 9 from Florida in August and wants to stop offering the rocket to commercial and government customers within a few years. The pace has already eased: on 27 October the 365-day tally fell below 150 orbital launches for the first time since July 2025, down from a peak of 171 in December 2025.

The workhorse in numbers

• 700 Falcon 9 launches to date, the latest on 30 October.
• 18 flights for booster B1093, including Transporter-16 and 14 Starlink batches.
• 675 Falcon booster landings overall, 231 of them on this droneship.
• 11 SpaceX orbital launches in October 2026.

Starship's next step

The successor is close. The FAA's planning calendar lists Starship Flight 15 for 12 November, Starlust reported on 30 October, though no launch licence has been issued and NASASpaceflight said the date had slipped slightly. The upper stage, Ship 42, has completed its static fire, and Elon Musk wrote on X on 29 October that it will be the first ship caught by the tower. On the company's third-quarter call, Musk said Starship should fly weekly in the first half of next year and about twice a week by the end of it.

Seven hundred flights made reuse ordinary. Starship has to make it routine for the ship as well.

Elsewhere in orbit

On 29 October, NASA's Anil Menon and the Canadian Space Agency's Joshua Kutryk spent 7 hours and 11 minutes outside the International Space Station installing the seventh of eight new roll-out solar arrays, Spaceflight Now reports. They go out again on 5 November for the last one, which will lift the station's available power from 160 to about 215 kilowatts.

Turkey, meanwhile, detailed its first Moon mission. The TLM-1 orbiter, about 3.6 tonnes and built by Tübitak Uzay with DeltaV, is booked on a Falcon 9 for the second quarter of 2027, aiming for April, and will fly a 100 km polar lunar orbit. Spaceflight Now notes that 56 of its 65 elements are made in Turkey.

Next on the calendar: a classified Space Force mission, USSF-432, with a window opening at 5:42 p.m. Pacific time today, 2 November, from Vandenberg, according to Starlust, then Vulcan's return to flight on 13 November.