HAWTHORNE, Calif. — SpaceX flew its Falcon 9 fleet leader, booster B1067, on a record-breaking 35th flight Sunday morning, lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station at 6:07 a.m. EDT (1007 UTC) and deploying 29 Starlink V2 Mini Optimized satellites into low Earth orbit. The Starlink 10-35 mission extended B1067's own flight record and pushed the Falcon 9 program one step closer to demonstrating 40 reuses per booster — a milestone SpaceX has set as its engineering benchmark for the vehicle.
Following stage separation, B1067 executed a controlled re-entry and landed aboard the drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas downrange in the Atlantic Ocean, the booster's 35th successful landing to match its 35th launch.
B1067's Remarkable History
Booster B1067 debuted in June 2021 carrying NASA's CRS-22 commercial resupply mission to the International Space Station, hauling cargo for the agency before pivoting to an almost exclusively Starlink-focused flight manifest. Over five years, the booster has flown crew missions (Crew-3 and Crew-4), commercial satellite deployments (Türksat 5B, Hotbird 13G, Koreasat 6A), and 23 Starlink batch launches.
The 69-day turnaround between B1067's 34th and 35th flights reflects SpaceX's standard Falcon 9 refurbishment cadence for high-cycle boosters. As of today, SpaceX operates seven Falcon 9 first stages with more than 25 flights each — B1063 at 32, B1069 at 31, B1071 at 33, B1077 at 28, B1078 at 28, and B1080 at 26 — with B1067 leading the pack at 35.
Toward 40 Flights Per Booster
In its IPO prospectus filed with the SEC, SpaceX noted that its Falcon 9 boosters have been engineered and demonstrated to support up to 40 flights, though the company has set a maximum accounting useful life of 25 flights for financial modeling purposes — reflecting contractual restrictions from some government customers who cap booster reuse at five flights and the planned transition to Starship, which will eventually absorb much of the commercial manifest.
For the engineering teams at SpaceX, the push past 35 is more than a headline. It validates the refurbishment protocols, thermal protection systems, and structural inspection regimes that allow a rocket booster to survive dozens of supersonic descents and precision ocean landings with margins wide enough for continued service.
Starlink at 10,400+ Satellites
The 29 satellites deployed by today's mission joined a Starlink constellation that now exceeds 10,400 active spacecraft in orbit — roughly two-thirds of all operational satellites circling Earth. SpaceX has maintained a launch cadence of roughly one Starlink mission per week through 2026, building toward the denser coverage tiers needed to support Starlink's direct-to-cell service and enterprise connectivity products.
With B1067's record set and the booster back in inventory, SpaceX will evaluate it for further flights as the company pushes its reuse program toward the 40-flight engineering limit — a bar that, if cleared, would set a new global record for rocket reusability.
