Last night, under the cool, coastal sky of California, something both utterly remarkable and beautifully mundane happened. At 8:54 p.m. Pacific Time, a Falcon 9 rocket, tail number B1071, ignited its engines and clawed its way into the darkness. It was carrying 28 more Starlink satellites, another routine delivery for the growing orbital network. The rocket ascended, the stages separated, and just over eight minutes later, the booster landed itself perfectly on a drone ship named ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’
I watched the livestream, and honestly, the most stunning part of the whole event was how… normal it felt. There was no massive media frenzy, no global nail-biting. It was just another Tuesday night launch, one that news outlets covered with headlines like SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites with a Falcon 9 booster flying for a 29th time. And that very normalcy is the quiet, earth-shaking miracle I want to talk about. Because this wasn't just any flight. It was the 29th time this specific piece of hardware, this single booster, has been to space and back.
Twenty-nine times. Let that sink in. We are witnessing the birth of a paradigm that science fiction has only dreamed of, and we’re treating it like the 11 o’clock news. This is the kind of breakthrough that reminds me why I got into this field in the first place.
The Workhorse, Not the Racehorse
For decades, we treated space rockets like priceless, thoroughbred racehorses—each one a magnificent, custom-built champion, run once and then retired forever. The Saturn V that took us to the moon was an unparalleled masterpiece of engineering, but we only built 13 of them. They were monuments.
Booster B1071 is not a monument. It’s a workhorse. It’s the hard-working Clydesdale of the space age, showing up day after day to pull the heavy plow of progress. When we talk about a "booster," we're really talking about the first stage of the rocket—in simpler terms, it's the colossal engine and fuel tank assembly that does the brutal, heavy lifting of punching a hole through Earth's atmosphere. For more than 60 years, we treated this, the most expensive part of the rocket, as disposable trash, letting it burn up or crash into the ocean.
Imagine building a brand-new Boeing 747 for a single flight from New York to London, only to ditch it in the Atlantic. It sounds insane, right? Yet that was the unquestioned logic of spaceflight until a decade ago. This single booster, B1071, has launched critical science missions for NASA, deployed national security assets for the NRO, and carried dozens of smaller satellites for innovative startups on rideshare missions. It’s not just a vehicle; it’s a foundational piece of 21st-century infrastructure.
This relentless, repeatable success transforms the entire economic equation of space. It’s a shift from bespoke artistry to industrial-scale production. What happens to human ambition when the cost of reaching orbit plummets by an order of magnitude? What kind of science, what kind of business, what kind of art becomes possible when the final frontier has a regular, scheduled shuttle service?
The Standardization of a Dream
I believe this moment is analogous to the invention of the standardized shipping container in the 1950s. Nobody ever wrote epic poems about the humble shipping container. It’s a boring metal box. But that boring box connected the world, created global supply chains, and fundamentally reshaped the modern economy in ways no one could have predicted. It wasn't the goods inside that mattered as much as the creation of a reliable, cheap, and standardized system for moving them.
That’s what we are seeing with the Falcon 9. The sheer cadence of these launches is just staggering—it means the gap between an idea on a whiteboard and a functioning satellite in orbit is closing faster than we can even comprehend, creating a feedback loop of innovation that will compound on itself for decades. We’re not just launching satellites; we’re launching possibilities.
Of course, this new capability comes with profound responsibilities. As we fill the skies, we must become better stewards of the orbital environment. We need robust plans for traffic management and de-orbiting old hardware to ensure that low Earth orbit remains a sustainable resource for generations to come. The power to build a new world in the sky comes with the duty to keep that sky clean and safe.
But the central truth remains. The launch of B1071 for the 29th time wasn't the headline event. The headline is the system that made it possible. A system of reuse, reliability, and relentless iteration that has turned the impossible dream of cheap access to space into a logistical reality. The question is no longer how we get there. The question is: what will we do now that the door is wide open?
The Age of Access Has Begun
Let’s be clear. What we saw last night wasn't just another launch. It was a punctuation mark in history. The era of treating space as a precious, impossibly expensive destination is over. We are now officially in the age of access—an age where the path to orbit is becoming a well-worn highway, not a treacherous, one-off expedition. This changes everything. The industries, the science, and the dreams that will be built on this foundation are, right now, beyond our wildest imagination. We just lit the fuse.