Here’s the breakdown for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 launches in 2026 so far:
Total: ~75 Falcon 9 launches (as of June 28, 2026)
SpaceX has launched 75 Falcon 9 missions so far in 2026, and the vast majority — about 80% — have been dedicated to building out the company’s Starlink constellation. That works out roughly to:
This tracks with the pattern from 2025. In 2025, SpaceX completed 165 Falcon 9 launches, but only 43 were for outside customers — with nearly three-quarters used internally for Starlink. The external customer launches in 2026 have included missions for NASA, the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office), AST SpaceMobile, and commercial satellite operators like SiriusXM.
SpaceX is essentially the world’s largest customer of SpaceX, which lets the company smooth out demand cycles, justify capital investment in reusability, and keep its production lines hot regardless of whether outside customers materialize in any given quarter.
Compared SpaceX to RocketLab customer launches so far in 2026:
Total launches in 2026 so far: 12 (as of June 28)
The most recent launch — “Ten Owl of Ten” on June 26 — was Rocket Lab’s 12th overall launch of 2026, and the 9th for Electron this year. The other 3 flights were performed by HASTE, the suborbital variant of Electron used to test hypersonic technologies.
Since Rocket Lab doesn’t launch satellites for its own constellation the way SpaceX does with Starlink, essentially all of its launches are for customers — it has no internal payload program to speak of. Here’s a snapshot of who those customers have been:
- Open Cosmos (Jan 22) — 2 Earth observation satellites
- Confidential commercial customer — undisclosed payload
- Synspective — multiple Strix SAR satellites (Japanese Earth imaging)
- JAXA — Japanese research payloads
- NRO / U.S. government — classified missions
- iQPS — Japanese SAR satellites
- HASTE missions (×3) — suborbital hypersonic test flights for U.S. government/defense customers
Rocket Lab set a new company record in 2025 with 21 missions total. At 12 launches through late June, they’re on a similar pace heading into the second half of 2026.
The contrast with SpaceX is stark — where SpaceX uses ~80% of its Falcon 9 flights for its own Starlink network, Rocket Lab’s entire manifest is external customer work.
