Florida's Space Coast breaks record for most launches in a year

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Updated  October 28, 2024 7:48pm EDT
FOX 35 Orlando

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. - With the launch of a SpaceX rocket on Saturday, the Space Coast hit a major milestone, with 73 launches this year. 

The Falcon Nine carried 22 Starlink satellites into orbit. At Jetty Park, Mary Harris said her son works for Blue Origin, and she never gets tired of watching the rockets go up. 

"I still like to catch the night ones, because they're really nice, I like them."

Saturday’s record-breaking mission capped off a very busy week in space news. NASA’s crew of eight members returned to Earth on Friday, after a nearly eight-month mission. The SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico just before 3:30 a.m., EST. The three NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut spent 235 days in space, the longest of any human SpaceX mission.

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"It wasn’t that long ago when we were happy to have 20 launches a year. We’re doing four to five times that now. It’s almost surreal now," said Don Platt, Associate Professor of Space Systems at Florida Tech.

On Wednesday, SpaceX launched another Falcon Nine mission that carried 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. KSC officials said that after some infrastructure upgrades, they aimed to host five commercial human space flight companies on-site by next year. 

"It is the vision that we laid out back in 2014 with the Kennedy Space Center master plan," said Tom Engler, Center Planning & Development Director for the Kennedy Space Center.

With two more months to go in the year, there are still plenty more launches expected. Launch 74 is set for Wednesday. Jerry Eller, a Merritt Island resident, said the space industry has the potential to bring more people together. 

"Never gets old. They're always different, of course. We know that it's making the world a smaller place."

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