Hope Sterling: The global record for orbital launches in a single year — ever, any country, any company, any era — got broken in 2025. And then broken again. Final number: 324 total orbital attempts worldwide, per SpaceNews.
Hope Sterling: SpaceX launched 165 of them.
Hope Sterling: That's — mm. That's more than half of all orbital launches on Earth, from one company, one rocket type. Falcon 9. December 17th was the finish line.
Hope Sterling: The prior record was 259 — in 2024 — and SpaceX helped set that one too. Year before that: 96. Before that, 61. I mean, the trajectory isn't a surprise if you've been paying attention, but it still… it hits differently when you see it written out like that.
Hope Sterling: CASC — China's state-affiliated launch body — did 73 in 2025. Their national record. Independent trackers say maybe 90 to 93. Pick whichever number you want, SpaceX alone nearly doubled them.
Hope Sterling: 85% of all U.S. orbital launches. One Falcon 9 every 2.2 days.
Hope Sterling: And look — I know what the clean narrative is here. SpaceX, unstoppable, everyone else scrambling. But that framing skips the actually interesting part.
Hope Sterling: Because the reason those 165 launches happened is mostly Starlink — SpaceX flying its own satellites to build its own internet constellation on its own rocket. That's vertical integration at a scale that genuinely has no comparison. This isn't a story about beating competitors for customers. It's weirder and bigger than that.
Hope Sterling: The physical reason this cadence is even possible is reusability — they land those Falcon 9 boosters, turn them around, fly them again. That's what makes one launch every two days economically survivable.
Hope Sterling: 2,400 tonnes of payload to orbit in 2025. Their 2024 number was about 1,200 tonnes — so they doubled themselves in one year. And honestly, that mass figure is the real scope signal. Not the count. The mass.
Hope Sterling: Vertical integration — SpaceX isn't winning a market. It IS the market.
Hope Sterling: Like, most of those 165 Falcon 9 launches? Self-manifest. SpaceX flying Starlink satellites it built, on a rocket it built, that it's going to land and fly again. That is not a commercial launch business in any normal sense. That's a closed loop.
Hope Sterling: No external customer required.
Hope Sterling: And Gwynne Shotwell — SpaceX's president — she projected 175 to 180 launches for 2025 at the start of the year. Fourteen, fifteen a month. They revised it down to 165 over the summer. Not because they hit a manufacturing wall, not because the rocket couldn't do it — because of business needs, scheduling decisions. They CHOSE 165.
Hope Sterling: The ceiling isn't the rocket. The ceiling is demand. And they control both sides of that equation.
Hope Sterling: Now think about what that means for everyone else trying to compete — because it gets genuinely uncomfortable.
Hope Sterling: United Launch Alliance. Vulcan. Their next-gen rocket debuted January 2024 — and since then? Four flights. Four. It's carrying a backlog of about 70 launches, and it just took its SECOND solid rocket booster nozzle anomaly in under two years.
Hope Sterling: Second one.
Hope Sterling: The U.S. Space Force didn't mince words about it either — a three-star general said on record that Vulcan's anomalies will 'absolutely' factor into how the Pentagon structures its next launch services competition. Absolutely. That's not a hedge, that's a signal.
Hope Sterling: And Blue Origin is out here seeking new funding, trying to get into this game. Which — I want to root for more players, genuinely. But the gap they're chasing is… not a gap. It's a canyon.
Hope Sterling: So what does it mean when the Pentagon's backup — the literal alternative to Falcon 9 — is four flights in and anomaly-flagged, while SpaceX is flying every 2.2 days on reusable hardware? Like, does that feel like a competitive market to you?
Hope Sterling: Analysts are using the word monopoly. Not casually — they're flagging concentration risk, specifically, about a single private company controlling the majority of global orbital launch infrastructure. And I don't think that's alarmist. I think that's just… the math.
Hope Sterling: SpaceX built the cadence on reusability, funded it through Starlink, and now the cadence itself IS the moat. CNBC and financial analysts are calling it a durable structural advantage — not just a lead, a self-reinforcing loop that gets harder to close every single launch.
Hope Sterling: That's not dominance. That's architecture. And that distinction matters a lot.
Hope Sterling: But like — okay, this is the part I actually keep sitting with. If 165 launches is mostly SpaceX feeding Starlink, then the real question isn't whether the rocket can keep up. It's whether the constellation ever… fills up.
Hope Sterling: How many satellites does one internet network actually need?
Hope Sterling: Because Starlink is what's driving this cadence. That's the self-manifest payload, that's the closed loop — and at some point, the buildout matures. SpaceNews flagged this directly: future growth may depend on factors that are completely different from what's been fueling the surge. Which is a careful way of saying the 165-launch pace is not guaranteed to just… keep climbing.
Hope Sterling: That's the honest objection to the whole 'unstoppable trajectory' read.
Hope Sterling: And then there's Starship. Which — oh my gosh — five suborbital test flights in 2025. None of them reached orbit. None of them count in the 165 Falcon 9 tally. So Starship is basically this enormous variable hovering just outside the frame of everything we're talking about.
Hope Sterling: If Starship hits operational cadence, does it replace Falcon 9 volume? Add to it? Does it shift the economics so completely that the whole reusability moat just… reconfigures around a bigger rocket?
Hope Sterling: Nobody actually knows yet.
Hope Sterling: And I want to be honest about the China number too, because I've been throwing around this 'SpaceX nearly doubled them' framing and — wait, it's a little messier than that. CASC reported 73 orbital launches in 2025. Their national record. But independent trackers put the real number closer to 90 to 93. So the two-to-one ratio is real, but it IS source-dependent. Just — know that when you repeat this at a dinner party.
Hope Sterling: Either way SpaceX is lapping them. But the margin shifts depending on who's counting.
Hope Sterling: The thing I'm actually watching — the one concrete signal that'll tell us whether SpaceX's position is a moat or basically a government mandate — is the U.S. Space Force's next launch services competition.
Hope Sterling: Vulcan is already on the table. That three-star general didn't hedge — he said the anomalies will 'absolutely' factor into how the Pentagon structures it. ABSOLUTELY. And Vulcan has flown four times since January 2024, hit two solid rocket booster nozzle anomalies, and is sitting on a backlog of roughly 70 launches it hasn't touched. That is not a competitor. That is a liability.
Hope Sterling: So when that competition gets structured — when the Pentagon has to decide how much of national security launch it hands to one private company — that result will tell us everything. Whether this is a market SpaceX won… or one they simply became.
Hope Sterling: Because that's the thing nobody wants to say out loud — 165 Falcon 9 launches isn't a sign that the commercial launch market is booming. It's one company flying its own satellites on its own rocket and landing that rocket and flying it again. The customer and the operator are the same entity. That closed loop is the whole story.
Hope Sterling: Starlink fills the manifest. Reusability makes the economics hold. And so SpaceX doesn't need to win business from anyone — it just needs to keep building its constellation. That is not a market they competed in. That's a market they made irrelevant to themselves.
Hope Sterling: And like — Vulcan has four flights and two nozzle anomalies and seventy launches sitting in a backlog it can't touch. Blue Origin is out there seeking funding. CASC got to 73, maybe 93, and SpaceX nearly doubled them on either count. Every number points the same direction. Every single one.
Hope Sterling: SpaceX didn't open the space economy. It cornered it.
