— Peter H. Diamandis, MD (@PeterDiamandis) March 31, 2026
The Q4 2025 Rocket Report dropped yesterday and the number that should terrify every government on Earth is not the one going viral.
— Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ (@shanaka86) March 31, 2026
SpaceX launched 1,159 of the 1,404 spacecraft put into orbit worldwide in Q4 2025. That is 83% of all spacecraft launched by every nation and… pic.twitter.com/UXq33nfMIC
This all looks very good on paper. We still have a ways to go. Not long, but still a ways. At least with New Space we aren’t hostage to the whims of the Federal government.
Starlink I think can and should be pointed to as a break-out technology. I use for evidence the fact that MORE than a *decade* earlier, Craig McGraw envisioned a similar system and founded a company called Teledesic to exploit offering high-speed Internet to rural areas and the planet in general via LEO satellites. But the company soon foundered because the required infrastructure couldn’t be economically launched from Earth (at ~$250/m per launch). The partially reusable Falcon 9 fixed that. Which was the barrier to entry that allowed Starlink to literally get off the ground and has without doubt contributed to financially bootstrapping the rest.
So two dates. May 2019 with the launch of 60 operational Starlink satellites and before that December 2015 with the first successful landing of a Falcon 9 class orbital first stage or April 16 2016 with the first successful at sea landing which allowed for booster recovery over a more extended range of launch trajectories. I personally put December 21, 2015 right up there with July 20, 1969. Both dates I remember vividly.
If you want you could go back to September 28, 2008 but other companies have achieve that milepost but not to the effect of Starlink. So I think my dates above are more pertanent to the topic at hand.
Craig McCaw. Fascinating individual.
oops you are right! Typo on the name, can’t edit to fix, my bad…
That was originally Ed Tuck’s idea. He called it “Calling Communications.” McCaw later picked it up and renamed it “Teledesic.” I think there was Microsoft money involved. But it was for phone calls, not Internet (which at the time few people were even aware of, other than for email).
I beg to disagree. I think you are thinking of Iridium and Globalstar.
And yes, according to the Wikipedia link, Gates was an early investor in Teledesic.
No, it was Ed Tuck and Calling Communications. Iridium came along later. I know because I was still at Rockwell at the time and talking to him about it as a potential payload for a commercial launch system, which I was still (in futility, which is why I eventually left) trying to convince management to do.
Hi Rand,
I wasn’t referring to Calling Communications and Ed Tuck, but McCaw’s envisioning of Teledesic.
At the time I was only observing Teledesic from the outside. It’s quite possible that McCaw was running with Tuck’s idea and maybe starting with telephony, but it was clear from Teledesic’s early pressers that the goal was broadband (i.e. Internet-style) service.
I was paying particular attention in that time-frame because I was a user of Hughes’ DirecPC (now called HughesNet and not to be confused with DirecTV) until Comcast finally came along…
Very much agree. At every point in its history, SpaceX has made what it was doing five years previously look like kid stuff. That’s going to continue. We are looking at an exponential function do its thing right in front of our eyes.
Mr. Perera is right too – “It is the first vertically integrated civilization-scale stack in human history.” It’s still under construction, but, yeah, that’s what it is. And that is what it needs to be as Musk intends not only to transform Earthbound civilization but to establish new civilizations elsewhere in the Solar System.
The concrete never sets on Elon Musk’s empire.
I see a different use for Starlink. Put a constellation above the planets you plan to inhabit. Instantly you have global communications and navigation. Add some RADAR/LIDAR, and you have mapping as well.
Absolutely. Moon then Mars.