for me the news of the week is that SpaceX not only launched a Falcon Heavy rocket, but two other Falcon 9 missions on separate coasts as well in just five days. The operational challenges of this are immense and, I think, underappreciated outside of people directly involved in this kind of work. //

SpaceX approaches ludicrous cadence. In the movie Space Balls, "ludicrous speed" is the velocity attained by a spaceship traveling much faster than the speed of light. That is the velocity of cadence SpaceX is now approaching with its Falcon family of rockets. On Thursday morning, the company launched a Falcon 9 rocket carrying 51 Starlink satellites from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. This was the company's fifth launch of 2023.

If you're keeping track at home ... As of January 19, SpaceX has launched a rocket every 3.8 days during this calendar year. Extrapolated out to a full year, SpaceX is on pace for 96 Falcon launches in 2023. While that probably won't happen, it indicates that SpaceX founder Elon Musk's prediction of 100 orbital launches this year was not all that, ahem, ludicrous.