SpaceX launched its 100th orbital mission of the year shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, deploying broadband internet satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base.
Vandenberg Liftoff Cements 100th Orbital Mission of 2026
SpaceX reached its 100th orbital mission of the year shortly after midnight on Saturday morning. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off at 12:25 a.m. PDT (3:25 a.m. EDT / 0725 UTC) from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, flying on a south-easterly trajectory upon leaving the pad to deliver another batch of broadband internet satellites.
The Starlink 15-20 mission added another 29 broadband internet satellites to the company’s megaconstellation in low Earth orbit. This milestone marks the third year in a row that SpaceX has hit the century mark in annual launches, having first reached the 100-mission milestone in 2024 with a total of 138 missions, which included 132 launches of Falcon 9, two of Falcon Heavy, and four of Starship, before this number increased to 170 in 2025, involving 165 Falcon missions and five Starship flights.
With its latest Falcon 9 launch on Wednesday, the company completed its 100th mission of 2026. The rocket lifted off at 12:01 am EDT (9:01 pm PDT on Tuesday, local time) from Space Launch Complex 4 East (SLC-4E) at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California with 24 Starlink satellites, marking the 97th Falcon 9 mission of the year. SpaceX ended its livestream before showing the satellite deployment, but announced an hour after launch on X that all satellites were successfully deployed.
Booster Recovery and Megaconstellation Scale
SpaceX launched this mission using the Falcon 9 first stage booster with the tail number B1100. This was its ninth flight after previously launching the NROL-105 mission for the National Reconnaissance Office as well as seven batches of Starlink satellites. Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, B1100 landed on the droneship, Of Course I Still Love You, positioned in the Pacific Ocean. This was the 220th landing on this vessel and the 653rd Falcon booster landing to date.
The first-stage booster landed safely about nine minutes after liftoff on the Of Course I Still Love You droneship stationed in the Pacific Ocean during the Wednesday launch. According to SpaceX, this mission marked the 12th flight of this specific booster, which previously launched Sentinel-6B, Twilight, NROL-172, Transporter-17, and seven Starlink missions.
With the successful deployment of these payloads, the operational count of the network has grown substantially. SpaceX founder Elon Musk confirmed on Friday that it now has more than 11,000 Starlink satellites in orbit, with the satellite internet network which boasts nearly 11,000 operational satellites to date, per Space.com. Observers note that the frequency of these launches has transformed orbital logistics, with international reporting highlighting how rapidly space has shifted from a final frontier to an active highway, and analysts at CIO Bulletin frequently observing that the speed at which SpaceX is normalising such complex maneuvers is unprecedented.
Launch Mix and Future Payload Ambitions
While the vast majority of SpaceX flights are dedicated to the Starlink satellite internet network, the mission tally reflects a diverse manifest. Out of the total, 97 are Falcon missions whereas the others involved Falcon Heavy and Starship. The non-Falcon 9 missions so far this year involved the Falcon Heavy (one launch) and the world’s largest rocket, Starship (two flights). The latest milestone comes a few days after the company set a new record by launching two Falcon rockets just 38 minutes apart. While one of the rockets lifted off on the evening of August 15 from Florida’s Cape Canaveral Space Force Station with eight Globalstar 2-R satellites, the other launched from Vandenberg with a classified payload for the USSF-366 mission of the US Space Force.
Looking ahead, the company is now aiming to exponentially increase its mass to orbit, which was over 2,200 tonnes in 2025. Company CEO Elon Musk agreed with a post on X stating that SpaceX is aiming for 2.25 million tonnes of mass to orbit per year by 2032, which is roughly a 1,000-fold increase over the previous year. In the coming years, the Falcon and Starship rockets will launch massive equipment for orbital data centers, next-gen Starlink satellites, and payloads for NASA’s Artemis program, which will greatly boost SpaceX’s ambitions for higher payload transfer.
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