Last night at 9:46 PM ET, I watched (via livestream, sadly — not in person) as another Falcon 9 rocket lit up the night sky over Kennedy Space Center, carrying the Fram2 mission to orbit. The launch marked the sixth successful flight for booster B1085, which stuck another perfect landing on the droneship "Just Read the Instructions" about eight minutes after liftoff.
This was SpaceX's 37th launch of 2025 — which is frankly mind-boggling when you do the math. We're only 91 days into the year, which means they're averaging a launch every 2.46 days. For context, back in 2020, they launched 26 rockets in the entire year. The pace of innovation here is nothing short of remarkable.
For investors following the space sector, SpaceX's operational efficiency continues to leave competitors in the dust. While the company remains private (much to the frustration of retail investors like myself), its activities have ripple effects across publicly traded aerospace companies.
Lockheed Martin (LMT, $453.78, -0.2%) and Boeing (BA, $187.32, +0.8%) have both struggled to match SpaceX's launch cadence and reusability capabilities. Meanwhile, smaller players like Rocket Lab (RKLB, $5.23, +1.2%) are carving out niches in the small satellite launch market, but none can match SpaceX's scale.
The next SpaceX mission — Starlink Group 6-80 — is already scheduled for April 5th. That's just four days away! At this point, launches that would have been front-page news a decade ago barely register in the news cycle.
I can't help but wonder what this means for the future of space access. When I was a kid, space launches were special events that we'd watch in school. Now they're happening so frequently that they've become almost... routine? That's both amazing and a little surreal.
And yet, despite the frequency, I still find myself stepping outside to look up whenever there's a launch visible from my area. Some things never get old.
