SpaceX is racking up lots of records with the furious launch cadence of its workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, which is the only orbital class rocket with a reusable first stage, or booster. On Friday, SpaceX started a launch campaign with three Falcon 9 launches in three days, beginning with a another batch of Starlink satellites into orbit from Kennedy Space Center (KSC) in Florida. This launch has a number of notable milestones, such as the following:

– 1st booster to fly for a 13th time
– 100th re-flight of a booster
– 124th booster landing
– 50th consecutive landing (a record)

SpaceX has recently certified the Falcon 9 booster for 15 flights, up from 10. NASA has even flown crew on reused boosters, signaling a high level of confidence in the safety and performance of the vehicle.

SpaceX makes it look easy, but it is not. There are many things that can go wrong but everything has to go right to get off the pad, out of the atmosphere, and into orbit. Recently, Astra, a startup launch provider, had a launch attempt to send a pair of hurricane monitoring satellites for NASA into orbit from KSC. Astra’s rocket, called Rocket 3, has successfully taken payloads to orbit on previous attempts, but on this occasion the second stage shut down early and the payloads fell back to Earth. NASA has two additional pairs of these satellites it plans to launch with Astra. That is, of course once they identify and fix the issue leading to the second stage failure on this flight.