Florida annual launch document damaged with late-night Starlink flight – Spaceflight Now

Update Nov. 10, 11:30 p.m. EST (04130UTC): SpaceX confirms deployment of the 29 Starlink satellites.

The busiest spaceport on this planet broke one other document on Monday night time. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket was the 94th launch for an orbital class rocket from Florida, surpassing the whole achieved in 2024.

The complete was a mixture of Falcon 9 rockets in addition to Atlas 5 and Vulcan rockets from United Launch Alliance and one New Glenn flight from Blue Origin.

The Monday night time mission that tipped the scales into the document books was Starlink 6-87, which added one other 29 broadband web satellites to the corporate’s mega-constellation in low Earth orbit. SpaceX completed liftoff from pad 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 10:21 p.m. EST (0321 UTC).

The launch was initially scheduled about 5 hours earlier within the day, but it surely was pushed later as a result of the Federal Aviation Administration is limiting business launches to between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., because of the scarcity of air site visitors controllers throughout the federal government shutdown. Launches add considerably to the workload of air site visitors controllers because of the have to divert flights away from the launch hazard space.

The forty fifth Weather Squadron forecast a 60 % likelihood for favorable climate through the launch window due to a “strong cold front” transferring throughout the state on Monday. Meteorologists citied issues from robust winds at liftoff in addition to upper-level wind shear and considerably questionable climate within the booster restoration zone close to the Bahamas.

“The front itself will cross the region Monday morning, ushering in a blast of strong northwesterly winds and chilly temps that will linger through at least the first half of Tuesday,” launch climate officers wrote. “As a result, the main concern for the primary launch window will be liftoff winds.”

SpaceX used B1096 for the Starlink 6-87 mission, one of many newer Falcon 9 boosters in its fleet. Monday’s launch was its third flight following KF-01 for Amazon’s Project Kuiper and NASA’s IMAP rideshare mission earlier this yr.

Less than eight minutes after liftoff, B1096 carried out an autonomous touchdown try on the drone ship, ‘Just Read the Instructions’. This was the 141st touchdown on this vessel and the 532nd booster touchdown thus far.

Records are made to be damaged

For greater than half a decade, Florida’s spaceport, a mixture of each NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, have been steadily rising the variety of orbital launches, thanks largely to a yearly ramp up in flights from SpaceX.

Between its two Falcon launch pads, Launch Complex 39A and Space Launch Complex 40, SpaceX can have launched 88 occasions after flying the Starlink 6-87 mission, about 95 % of the launches from Florida’s Space Coast.

Falcon launch #130 for 2025. The rolling 365 launch complete is 166 launches!

Notable data from this morning:
* Fastest launch to launch from the identical American Launch Pad at 55 Hrs, 29 minutes and 9 seconds
* Fastest TE roll in to hangar for booster integration to launch at 12…

— Kiko Dontchev (@TurkeyBeaver) October 16, 2025

The influence of a few of these launches was mirrored in October’s month-to-month CEO report delivered by Capt. John Murray, to the Port Canaveral Commission on Oct. 22. He famous that for all of Fiscal Year 2025 (Oct. 1, 2024 – Sept. 30, 2025) that there have been 90 boosters introduced into port together with 194 payload fairings, which he described as “quite significant.”

Port Canaveral doesn’t explicitly break down its itemizing of “Space Component Recoveries” in its report. Presumably, these numbers replicate simply SpaceX parts, however Spaceflight Now did attain out to Port Canaveral to hunt clarification.

The ramp up in launch cadence required each elevated agility on the a part of launch operators, like SpaceX and United Launch Alliance in addition to from those that handle the Eastern Range.

Ahead of the Aug. 4, 2022, launches of each the SBIRS GEO-6 and the Korea Pathfinder Lunar Orbiter by ULA and SpaceX respectively, Spaceflight Now Reporter Will Robinson-Smith spoke with members of the first Range Ops Squadron (1 ROPS) in his capability as a reporter for Spectrum News 13 on the time.

Back then, a double launch day was one thing that hadn’t been achieved in Florida because the Nineteen Sixties. U.S. Space Force 2nd Lt. Christian Jackson mentioned {that a} ramped up launch cadence was “something that we train for every week” in preparation for a extra airport-like flight atmosphere.

“Just a few years ago, they were launching maybe 12 rockets in a year. We’ve got about 60 plus on the manifest to finish out this year and there are hopes of possibly doing up to 100 launches next year,” Jackson mentioned in 2022. “So, if we want to reach those numbers, we’re definitely going to get to that point where we’re launching over one in a day.”

There have been many double launch days since then, with the latest being September 25, which noticed the launches of the Starlink 10-15 mission on a Falcon 9 rocket and the Kuiper Atlas 03 mission on an Atlas 5 551 rocket.

Leadership on the Cape has been working to extend payload processing facility capability to permit for additional ramp up of missions, with services like one devoted to Amazon’s Kuiper satellites coming on-line earlier this yr.