Another SpaceX Launch: Why It's Starting to Feel Depressingly Normal

So, another one went up.

Another Tuesday night on the California coast, another perfect, almost boringly perfect, pillar of fire punching a hole in the dark. SpaceX just launched its Starlink 11-17 mission. The headline might as well have been a line item on an inventory sheet: SpaceX launches 28 Starlink satellites with a Falcon 9 booster flying for a 29th time – Spaceflight Now. If you felt a deep, soul-stirring sense of… absolutely nothing, then congratulations. You’re finally seeing this for what it is.

This wasn’t a moment of human achievement. It was a shipping manifest. Another 28 Starlink satellites packed onto a Falcon 9 and fired into the void. The rocket, a booster with the tail number B1071, was on its 29th flight. Twenty. Nine. Times.

Let that sink in. We’re not talking about a marvel of engineering anymore; we’re talking about an old, inter-orbital pickup truck. SpaceX is treating its Falcon 9 boosters like they’re 1998 Toyota Corollas—just change the oil, slap on some new tires, and send ‘em back out for another 100,000 miles. This particular booster has done work for NASA and the spooks at the National Reconnaissance Office, so it’s seen some things. But now? It’s just a delivery van for space internet.

And we're supposed to cheer for this, because... well, because rockets are cool, I guess. But are they still cool when they’re this routine? At what point does the relentless efficiency stop being impressive and start feeling a little reckless? I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the day when one of these tired, overworked boosters finally decides it’s had enough.

The Spectacle is Dead, Long Live the Assembly Line

The real story isn’t the launch; it’s the normalization. This is a bad thing. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm cultural dumpster fire. We've taken one of humanity’s most profound dreams—reaching for the stars—and turned it into a logistical exercise. It’s about as inspiring as watching a FedEx plane take off.

At 8:54 p.m. Pacific Time, B1071 lit up the sky over Vandenberg Space Force Base. Eight and a half minutes later, it came down and nailed a perfect landing on the droneship ‘Of Course I Still Love You.’ It was the 516th booster landing to date. The 516th. The number is so big it’s meaningless. The miracle has been repeated so many times it’s just a line item on a spreadsheet now.

What exactly are we celebrating here? The triumph of reusable rocketry, or the triumph of turning low Earth orbit into a private, commercial toll road? Every one of these launches adds more satellites to a constellation that is already fundamentally changing our view of the night sky, and for what? So some guy in rural Montana can get slightly better bandwidth to stream Netflix?

I’m sitting here writing this on a cable connection that still stutters if my neighbor sneezes too hard, and I’m supposed to believe this is all for the good of humanity. Give me a break. This isn't about connecting the world. It’s about building a monopoly in a place where there are no regulations, no cops, and no one to tell you to stop. It's the final frontier, alright—the final frontier of unchecked capitalism.

Are We Even Asking the Right Questions?

We get so caught up in the numbers—29th flight, 516th landing, 28 more satellites—that we forget to ask the most important questions. Who gave one company permission to build a dome of its own hardware over our planet? What happens when these thousands of "V2 Minis" start failing and become the most dangerous field of space junk in human history?

The company, offcourse, will tell you it’s all safe. They have a plan. They always have a plan. But we’ve heard that before, haven’t we? From tech giants who swore they wouldn’t sell our data, from social media companies who promised to connect us but instead just divided us. The relentless pace, the sheer audacity of launching dozens of missions a year, feels less like confident innovation and more like a mad dash to deploy before anyone can put up a stop sign.

Maybe I’m the crazy one here. Maybe this is just progress, and I’m just some Luddite yelling at the sky. But I look at that launch, and I don't see a bright future. I see the industrialization of awe. I see a company so good at what it does that it has forgotten why it was supposed to be doing it in the first place. This ain't exploration. It's just business.

Just Another Tuesday in the Empire

Look, let’s be real. The romance is gone. We were sold a story about humanity becoming a multi-planetary species, a grand adventure among the stars. What we got instead is a brutally efficient space-based ISP. The successful landing of B1071 wasn't a victory for science; it was a victory for vertical integration. It proves the system works, the factory is running, and the product is being shipped on schedule. And if that doesn't feel a little empty to you, then I don't know what will. This isn't the dream. This is just the commute.