SpaceX completes 100th orbital mission of 2026; achieves milestone for third year in a row
SpaceX reached another major milestone on Wednesday. With its latest Falcon 9 launch, the company completed its 100th mission of 2026, hitting the century mark for the third year in a row. 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.
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. 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.
SpaceX ended its livestream before showing the satellite deployment, but announced an hour after launch on X that all satellites were successfully deployed. Most of SpaceX's launches this year were dedicated to Starlink—the satellite internet network which boasts nearly 11,000 operational satellites to date, per Space.com. The non-Falcon 9 missions so far this year involved the Falcon Heavy (one launch) and the world’s largest rocket, Starship (two flights).
SpaceX 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. This number increased to 170 in 2025, involving 165 Falcon missions and five Starship flights—the most launched by SpaceX to date. 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.
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.
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