SpaceX and Blue Origin set to make 2025 Florida’s biggest year in rocket launches yet

The year 2025 is set to break a record soon by becoming the year when the highest number of rocket launches took place from Florida.

2024 had held the record so far, with 93 launches taking place in Florida. However, on Sunday, 9 November, the 94th liftoff will be taking place, thus breaking the record for the fourth successive year.

The record could have been broken on Saturday itself, but a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket's liftoff was rescheduled for Sunday. This rocket will launch 29 Starlink broadband satellites into low-Earth orbit on Sunday betweeen 3:10 am and 7:10 am from the NASA Kennedy Centre's pad 39A.

The record-breaking 94th launch is scheduled to take place hours after the SapceX launch. And this launch will be of SpaceX's only major competitor in the space sector: Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin.

Blue Origin's second New Glenn rocket is also scheduled to be launched on Sunday. This launch will be for NASA, as the Blue Origin rocket will be sending the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft to study the magnetosphere of Mars. This rocket is set to launch between 2:45 om to 5:11 pm local time from Launch Complex 36.

The Falcon 9 rockets were used in all of these 87 launches. Most of them can either return to land or touch down on the top of drone ships in the Atlantic Ocean.

Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev, while talking about the issues with older rocket technology with Florida Today, said, "the airplane takes off, but the wings fall off and the fuselage falls off — and the only thing that makes it to its destination (is) just a small amount of people."

He said the new ways of refurbishing and relaunching boosters speeds up the rate of launches to "a mission cadence that the world has never seen before."

“Reusability is what’s enabled this massive cadence. And if you think about the arc of humanity, then what happens when a new mode of transportation is unlocked? You get this huge leap in capability, right?" Dontchev said while during a conversation at The Economist's Space Economy Summit at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, the publication reported.

"Whether it’s the railroad, an interstate highway, from sail ships to steamships, that’s what reusability has done. That’s what Falcon 9 has done. It’s allowed an entire economy to get built in low-Earth orbit,” he also said.