A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launches 25 Starlink satellites from California on April 26, 2026. It was SpaceX's 50th launch of the year. (Image credit: SpaceX) Share this article 0 Join the conversation Add us as a preferred source on Google Newsletter Subscribe to our newsletter SpaceX just notched a remarkable launch-dominance milestone.
Elon Musk's company has now lofted more spacecraft than the rest of humanity combined — and its lead is likely to grow over the coming months and years.
Investor and former space-industry executive Christian Keil highlighted the achievement in a June 12 X post, which noted that SpaceX had launched 15,262 satellites as of that date. The combined total for all other companies and organizations since the dawn of the space age in 1957 was 15,138, according to Keil.
Musk founded SpaceX in 2002. The company was not an instant success; its first three launches, with the homegrown Falcon 1 rocket, were failures. SpaceX finally broke through with a Falcon 1 success in 2008. A fourth straight failure probably would have been the end of the company, Musk has said.
SpaceX soon moved on to the Falcon 9 rocket, which debuted in 2010 and remains the company's workhorse; it flew a whopping 165 times in 2025.
Most of those launches — nearly 75% of them, in fact — were devoted to building out Starlink, the broadband megaconstellation SpaceX has assembled in low Earth orbit (LEO).
Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of objects that SpaceX has launched to date are Starlink satellites. As of June 18, the company has sent 12,318 of the internet spacecraft to LEO, according to astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
That number will continue growing far into the future, as Starlink could someday have 40,000 or more satellites.
And SpaceX is dreaming even bigger than that. Musk recently announced that he wants to operate a million data centers in space, as part of SpaceX's transition from a pure launch concern to a company focused heavily on artificial intelligence.
These spacecraft will be lofted by SpaceX's Starship megarocket, which is still in the test flight phase. Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, and it's designed to be fully and rapidly reusable.
SpaceX has teased a future that features thousands of Starship flights every year as the company helps humanity settle the moon and Mars, among other ambitious tasks. So, it's safe to say that SpaceX doesn't plan to relinquish its launch lead anytime soon.
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Mike WallSpaceflight and Tech EditorMichael Wall is the Spaceflight and Tech Editor for Space.com and joined the team in 2010. He primarily covers human and robotic spaceflight, military space, and exoplanets, but has been known to dabble in the space art beat. His book about the search for alien life, "Out There," was published on Nov. 13, 2018. Before becoming a science writer, Michael worked as a herpetologist and wildlife biologist. He has a Ph.D. in evolutionary biology from the University of Sydney, Australia, a bachelor's degree from the University of Arizona, and a graduate certificate in science writing from the University of California, Santa Cruz. To find out what his latest project is, you can follow Michael on Twitter.
